Turkey has opened a new exhibition of ancient artefacts—including ground-breaking discoveries and high-profile repatriations—demonstrating a government strategy to position the country as an archaeological heavyweight.
The Golden Age of Archaeology, held at a national library in the capital Ankara, comprises 570 artefacts, most of which have been unearthed in the past two years and are on display for the first time. Among them are 11,500-year-old Neolithic vessels and a Rosetta Stone-like tablet offering a key to a lost language of the Bronze Age.
The exhibition is the fruition of the government’s Heritage for the Future project, on which it is spending around $150m a year to unearth, protect and monetise Turkey’s past.
Sent into the field
Since 2023, thousands of staff, including Turkish site directors, have been assigned to excavations, while the traditional dig season has been extended year-round and in situ visitor centres and museums built to attract tourism revenue.
The number of active excavations has risen by more than a third in the past decade, to around 800. As a result, declared President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who opened the exhibition at the library on the grounds of the presidential palace complex on 6 August, “Turkey leads the world in archaeology, both on land and in underwater exploration.”
“Heritage for the Future is the most comprehensive archaeological effort in the republic’s history,” Erdoğan added. “If we cannot properly understand the history we have inherited, we cannot chart our future course.”
Crossroads of civilisations
Straddling Europe and Asia, Turkey bears traces of cultural patrimony that ranges from the world’s oldest known temples at Karahan Tepe and nearby Göbekli Tepe to the Bronze Age Hittite empire, Greco-Roman cities and Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman monuments.
Relics from each period are on display in the exhibition. A 1,000-year-old set of tiny scent bottles retrieved from the Mediterranean seafloor appears near a bronze Phrygian pot, encased in fabric that has survived intact since the early Iron Age.
A small clay tablet has a deity invocation ritual inscribed in Hittite text on one side and in Kalasma on the other—the latter language was unknown before the tablet was uncovered in 2023.
Stone bowls, stylised with snakes, gazelles and geometric patterns, are dated to between 9600BC and 8200BC. The vessels are among a series of discoveries at Karahan Tepe that are challenging conventional science on the date that humans first settled in villages. A necklace of delicate stone beads and a human head hewn from limestone are also on view.
Marcus Aurelius returns
The exhibition is centred around a towering, headless statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, on display for the first time in Turkey after it was smuggled out of the country in the 1960s and eventually wound up in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio.
Erected in the second or third century AD in a temple complex in the ancient city of Boubon, close to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, the rare bronze was at the heart of a lengthy legal battle until earlier this year, when the US museum dropped its lawsuit against a seizure order by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in New York.
It was returned to Turkey last month and is joined in the hall by other bronze works that are among nearly 1,200 objects that have been repatriated to the country in the past year alone, according to Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey’s culture minister.
Loot warning
Exhibiting the Marcus Aurelius statue “sends a strong message to all institutions that if you acquire looted objects, we will catch you one day”, says Zeynep Boz, who heads the Turkish office combating the trafficking of cultural property.
“Cultural property is for the whole of humanity, but protection must be assured at the territorial level, where we will make an object accessible and open to foreign visitors and researchers. This is why we have increased our (restitution) efforts,” she tells The Art Newspaper.
Amid the drive to dig up the past, some critics have sounded the alarm to the risks involved. Dangers include the pressure of tourism on fragile sites, political influence over research priorities, and the drying up of the relic pipeline—depriving the next generation of artefacts to discover and study with future technology.
But Bülent Gönültaş, Turkey’s deputy director of cultural heritage and museums, believes today’s archaeologists are only scratching the surface. At the opening of The Golden Age of Archaeology, he said: “Each year an average of 25,000 objects are entering our museums. It does not mean that one day there will be no more relics. We will not find everything, because only a small portion of the sites are being excavated. We are only just getting started.”
