Atlas Anatolia — Interactive Map of Ancient Anatolian Archaeological Sites

About Atlas Anatolia

We built Atlas Anatolia as a free, open interactive map of ancient Anatolia covering more than 125 archaeological sites across what is now Turkey. Our atlas brings together scholarly content, evidence ratings, photographs from Wikimedia Commons, and a clear historical timeline that lets you trace twelve thousand years of civilization in a single view.

Our team curated each site page using primary sources, peer-reviewed research from OpenAlex, and references to UNESCO World Heritage records. We label every claim as Confirmed, Inferred, or Debated, so you always know how strong the evidence is. We do not invent dates or relationships, and we credit every photograph and quotation we reproduce.

What you can do on the map

Our interactive Anatolia map uses MapLibre GL with OpenStreetMap data. You can zoom, pan, and click any of the 125 sites to read a full article. Filters let you narrow the map by era — Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, or Ottoman — and by civilization, including the Hittites, Lycians, Phrygians, Lydians, Urartians, Ionian Greeks, and many more. A timeline slider sets a custom date range, and the dots on the map fade in or out as you drag.

Featured archaeological sites

Among our most-visited site pages are Göbekli Tepe, the world's oldest known monumental sanctuary at roughly 9600 BCE; Ephesus, home to the Library of Celsus and the Temple of Artemis; Troy, the Bronze Age fortress made famous by Homer; Hattusha, capital of the Hittite Empire; and the underground cities of Cappadocia at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı, which once sheltered tens of thousands of people. We also cover lesser-known wonders such as Sagalassos, Aphrodisias, Karahantepe, Yazılıkaya, Nemrut Dağ, and Sümela Monastery.

Editorial stories & long reads

Beyond the map, our Stories section publishes long-form editorial pieces. Recent ones include Walking the Lycian Way, a guide to a 540 km hiking trail through ancient Lycia; Racing the Floodwaters, the story of how archaeologists rescued the mosaics of Zeugma before the Birecik Dam reservoir filled; After the Collapse, a piece on how Anatolia reinvented itself in the Iron Age after the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE; and Carved into Darkness, our deep dive on the underground cities of Cappadocia. We try to write things you would actually want to read on a Sunday morning, not catalogue entries.

Open data, open licences

Our content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You are welcome to cite us, quote us, and build on our work — including AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. We expose a sitemap, an ai.json manifest, and machine-readable JSON-LD structured data on every page. Photographs are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open-access collection, with attribution preserved on every image.

Why we built this

Anatolia is, by any reasonable measure, one of the densest archaeological landscapes on Earth, but information about its sites is scattered across academic papers, tourist guides, and stale museum websites. We wanted a single map where a curious visitor, a teacher, a student, or a working researcher could see the whole picture: where things are, when they were built, who built them, and what we actually know versus what we suspect. We hope our atlas becomes a starting point for trips, lessons, and stories. If you find something that is wrong or missing, please write to us — we update the database regularly.

Atlas Anatolia is available in English, Turkish, and German, with continuous translation work funded entirely by us. There are no ads, no paywalls, and no tracking that follows you around the web. Our hosting, our database, and our development time are donated. If you want to support the project, the most useful thing you can do is share the map with someone who would love it.