When Halicarnassus entered the Ottoman world, it did not yet resemble a town in the modern sense. It was, above all else, a castle with a harbour — a maritime outpost clinging to the edge of the Aegean. The earliest Ottoman voice to describe it belongs to Piri Reis, the celebrated corsair, navigator, and cartographer whose Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea) mapped the Mediterranean with an accuracy astonishing for its age.

Long before the great Artemision rose in Ephesus, the ground it occupied was already sacred. This was no sudden invention of Greek settlers, but rather a place layered with memory — like a manuscript written, erased, and written over again. To understand the Artemis of Ephesus is to abandon the idea of a single, fixed deity and instead step into a slow fusion of beliefs that unfolded across centuries.

February 2026 brought an extraordinary sweep of archaeological discoveries and heritage developments across Türkiye, spanning from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman era. In central Anatolia, a Hittite ritual vessel from Eskiyapar and fresh perspectives on the Topada Inscription illuminated the religious and political world of the second and first millennia BCE, while at Beycesultan a 3,900-year-old indigo-dyed textile reshaped understanding of Bronze Age technology. In the east, newly uncovered Urartian inscriptions at Körzüt Fortress offered rare historical testimony from the reign of King Minua, and in Trabzon an exceptionally rare ancient river port was identified deep beneath the modern city. Roman and Late Antique heritage also featured prominently, from Nilotic mosaics at Edessa and thousands of hydriskoi at Aigai to ongoing work at Pisidian Antioch and the management overhaul at Ephesus. Alongside these discoveries, major conservation and restoration projects — from Selimiye Mosque and Yenikapı's shipwrecks to earthquake-affected museums and monuments — underscored Türkiye's continuing efforts to preserve and reinterpret its layered past.