Ekrem Akurgal (March 30, 1911 – November 1, 2002) was a Turkish archaeologist. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, he conducted definitive research in several sites along the western coast of Anatolia such as Phokaia (Foça), Pitane (Çandarlı), Erythrai (Ildırı) and old Smyrna (Bayraklıhöyük, the original site of the city of Smyrna before the city's move to another spot across the Gulf of İzmir).
Biography
He was born on March 30, 1911, in the town of Tulkarm in the Beirut Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (today a Palestinian city in the West Bank), where his mother's family owned a large farm.[citation needed] He descended from a family of Ottoman intellectuals and religious men, several of whose members had assumed the office of mufti, the highest title of the Islamicclergy in a given region, for the Ottoman province of Herzegovina. His family moved back to Istanbul when he was two years old. For some time, they resided in another family farm, this time near Akyazı. He received his first education from his father's sister and her husband, who taught literature in Darülfünun (Istanbul University today).
Settled in İzmir since the seventies to pursue his work on the nearby sites with more effectiveness, Akurgal died on November 1, 2002, in İzmir. His work and legacy is being carried on by his wife, Meral Akurgal, an accomplished archaeologist herself and his closest assistant in his lifetime.
Cyril Mango, Ekrem Akurgal, and Richard Ettinghausen. The Treasures of Turkey: The earliest civilizations of Anatolia Byzantium the Islamic Period. (1966), Editions d'Art Albert Skira, Geneva, 253 pp.
