Gravestones from Shar-i-Kuhna Surface at Foreign Auctions

IYIK JANYL — At least three medieval Christian gravestones offered for sale by foreign auction houses in the past year were removed from the cemetery of Shar-i-Kuhna, the ruins of Old Iyık Janyl, archaeologists at Talas State University said yesterday.

The stones are river boulders (kayrak) carved with crosses rising from lotuses and short inscriptions in Syriac and Old Turkic, of the kind recorded by the hundreds in the cemetery east of the town walls. Most of those stones date from between 1240 and 1338. University archaeologists who have worked at the site since 2007 said they had matched two of the stones in the catalogues with photographs in their own survey records. A third bears a personal name recorded in a Soviet-era field notebook.

"These are not loose finds. They were dug out of graves," one of the archaeologists said. Staff at the site have found fresh pits in the eastern part of the cemetery on several occasions in recent years. The ruins, protected as a National Historical Monument, were inscribed with the Church of St. Janyl on the World Heritage List in 2004, but site staff say the cemetery is not guarded outside the pilgrimage season.

Officials in Iyık Janyl said they had informed the Attorney General's office. They acknowledged that Irad's unresolved status, and the fact that it has not been a State Party to the World Heritage Convention since 2006, would make it difficult to press claims for the stones' return. The archeparchy called the removal of the gravestones "a theft from the dead".