Karl Sester

Karl Sester

Karl Sester , also Carl Sester or Charles Sester , was a German road construction engineer and traveler to the Orient in the second half of the 19th century and is considered to be the discoverer of Nemrut Dağı .

The dates of life and the origin of Karl Sester are not known. He was traveling in the Orient in the late 19th century and had found a job as a cook with an English group that carried out surveying work for road construction in eastern Turkey. He acquired both knowledge of the country and road construction technology and rose to the position of chief engineer of the Ottoman vilayets Diyâr-ı Bekr before 1880 . During this time he received a reference to the ruins of the sanctuary on the summit of Nemrut Dağı from a Kurd he knew by the name of Bâko. They climbed the mountain together, where they only had about an hour to visit because of the lengthy and arduous ascent. He reported that shortly afterwards he had informed the Imperial German Embassy in Constantinople about his find, but there was no response. It was only when he informed the Imperial Consulate in Alexandria in the fall of 1881, during a stay in Egypt, that he was referred to the correct address. The following letter to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin meant that Alexander Conze , the general secretary of the German Archaeological Institute , instructed the archaeologist Otto Puchstein , who was in Egypt as a travel grantee, to contact Sester. Then Sester and Puchstein traveled together from Cairo to Nemrut Dağı in the spring of 1882. The first in-depth archaeological exploration of the sanctuary by Karl Humann and Puchstein followed in the next year .

Nothing is known about Karl Sester's further résumé.

literature

• Karl Humann, Otto Puchstein: Travels in Asia Minor and Northern Syria. Publishing house by Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1890, pp. 99-104.
• Friedrich Karl Dörner : The throne of the gods on the Nemrud Dag. Kommagene - the great archaeological adventure in Eastern Turkey. 3. Edition. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1987, ISBN 3-7857-0277-9 . Pp. 11-39.