Tadım Kalesi and its mound lie in the village of Tadım outside Elazığ, and what is coming out of the ground here is domestic rather than monumental — houses, hearths and the things people used. Excavation is run by the directorate of the Elazığ Archaeology and Ethnography Museum, under the ministry's Heritage for the Future programme.
One rectangular house has been uncovered in full: 11.60 by 5.70 metres, 66 square metres, in three parts, with walls 50 to 60 centimetres thick and a floor of yellow plaster — sand, clay and lime laid over compacted earth. In the south room stood two sacred hearths fixed to the floor, a single-handled jug with geometric decoration, and a quantity of Karaz-type pottery. These hearths are twin-headed, unlike those found in 2024, and carry animal figures that the excavators read as symbols of power. They take the jug to have been used for offering blood or sacred liquids. Earlier seasons had turned up a fixed and a portable sacred hearth bearing father, mother and child figures and stylised human-animal forms, a pot decorated with a wild goat and twelve Nakhchivan-type Karaz vessels, dated to between 4000 and 3000 BC.
The 2025 season added two houses built wall to wall, five altar bases belonging to them, and an altar with its blood channel. The archaeologists point to cut marks on that altar and to the human teeth and bone and animal bone found around the channel as evidence of human and animal sacrifice to gods and goddesses. Inside the house were piercing tools made from animal bone and weights of fired clay and stone, which the excavators read as the trace of a developed weaving culture.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Elazığ as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -0.7 °C in January to 27.2 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June and September; rainfall is heaviest in April (63 mm) and lightest in August (2 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
