Conference Presentations by Leyla OZLUOGLU
Stamped decoration of a Late Roman red slip group from Western Asia Minor, 2026
This is the abstract of an online lecture at the 26th Belgrade Conference on Archaeological Potte... more This is the abstract of an online lecture at the 26th Belgrade Conference on Archaeological Pottery (BECAP 26), held in Belgrade, Serbia, on 15th of May 2026.
In this paper, we deal with a red slip ware found in 2001 and 2002. The paper continues previous reports on the same material published, which examined some stamped decoration on these sherds. The focus of the present paper is to provide a corpus of whole stamped decoration classified in these vessels.
The ornamented examples in our corpus consist of 263 decorated amorphous and base/body sherds. Some of the samples bear roulette decoration on their rim and lip edges. Others have triangular, inverted triangular, round, and drop-shaped ornaments, either alone or in combination, in single, double, or multi-row roulette decoration. The stamped decorations were probably crafted with motifs prepared in wood or other material moulds. Sometimes the same decoration appears in identical proportions, size, and form, suggesting that they may have been produced in the same workshop, if not by the same potter. At other times, the motif is similar but with varying proportions and sizes. This feature indicates the existence and activities of various workshops during the Late Roman period.
Keywords: western Anatolia, Turkey, eastern Mediterranean, stamped decoration, Late Roman–Early Byzantine pottery, classical archaeology.
The church of St Nicholas in Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus) in south-western Turkey. An online lecture in Athens, Greece on 28 March 2025, 2025
This is the abstract of an online lecture with Ms Leyla Özlüoğlu in Athens, Greece which was held... more This is the abstract of an online lecture with Ms Leyla Özlüoğlu in Athens, Greece which was held at the 8th Symposium of Neohellenic Ecclesiastical Art and took place on 28th of March 2025, at 11am00.
In this online presentation on Zoom focus was a Late Ottoman Greek Orthodox church in Bodrum. Bodrum is a port and touristic city in the province of Muğla in South-western Turkey, ancient Caria. Known in Greek, Roman and Byzantine times as Halicarnassus, not much is known about Post-Medieval and Ottoman Bodrum: in 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the base of the Crusader knights on the neighbouring Rhodes, who left the Castle of Saint Peter and Bodrum to the Ottoman Empire. It is obvious that since the early 16th century until 1940s there was a Greek minority living in Halicarnassus and not much is known about this isolated community, as Bodrum was a quiet town of fishermen and sponge divers until the early 20th century. From 1867 until 1922, it was part of the Aidin Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. There are many Post-Byzantine Greek churches and chapels in different parts of the Bodrum Peninsula. A Greek Orthodox church was built in Bodrum in AD 1780 and re-built in 1873 and dedicated to St Nicholas, considered the patron saint of children and sailors, probably because of its distance to the harbour. This largest Greek church of the town was built in a 370 square meter in the center of Bodrum and is located in Hilmi Uran Square on Cumhuriyet (Republic) Street in the Çarşı (Central) District, that is known as Bodrum's old town. After the Graeco-Turkish exchange in 1923, it was used as a sponge warehouse, cinema, theater performance area, wedding hall, electricity production factory and even a mosque for a period of 46 years. It was severely damaged in the earthquake of 1944. It was demolished between 1965 and 1969 because of the danger of a possible collapse. At that time dynamite was used on its walls, which could not be demolished with a pick and shovel. The walls of the first floor, however, managed to survive. The public education building, which was used for the last 40 years, was erected on the walls of the first floor that survived in 1969.
Restoration of the church is a project that has been planned since the 2000s. In 2019, according to a statement made by Mayor of Bodrum, necessary permissions were obtained from the Board of Monuments in Muğla for the restoration of the church.
There are few inscriptions in the Nautical Museum of Bodrum, related to this building, one of which is a building inscription. The text of the inscription is as follows: ΔΙΑ ΣΥΝΔΡΟΜΗΣ ΤΩΝ / ΦΙΛΟΧΡΙΣΤΩΝ ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑ/ΝΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΔΙ' ΕΠΙΣΤΑΣΙΑΣ ΚΩ/ΝΣΤΑΝΤ(ΙΝΟΥ) ΑΝΤΩΝΙΟΥ
ΩΚΟΔ/ΟΜΗ(ΘΗ Ο ΝΑ)ΟΣ ΟΥΤΟΣ ΤΗΣ / ΘΕΟ(ΤΟΚΟΥ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣΟΔ)ΙΩΝ * / ....... (c.16 characters) .......ΕΝ / .Τ........... ΤΖΙΚΙ.
Translation. With the contribution of the Christ loving Christians
and with the supervision of Konstantinos Antoniou this church of the Entrance of Mother of God (Theotokos) in the Temple was built * / ....... (c.16 characters) .......ΕΝ / .Τ........... ΤΖΙΚΙ.
Epigraphic comments. Unfortunately the text in the last two lines (with - probably - the date of the building) is too destroyed to read.
In this paper the focus will be given to this church in the regards of Ottoman history, art history, archaeology and epigraphy.
Congressus internationales Smyrnenses by Leyla OZLUOGLU
by Ergun LAFLI, Marija Ljustina, Emmanuelle Dumas, Tiziano Latini, Evangelos A Papathanassiou, Zoe Tsiami, Leyla OZLUOGLU, Maurizio Buora, Hamat Ana, Ioanna N . Koukouni, Raimon Graells i Fabregat, Georgia Aristodemou, Nerantzis Nerantzis, Lidija Kovacheva, Lucia Novakova, and Fernando Quesada-Sanz Abstracts of the online conference on arrowheads in the ancient world in honour of Martin Henig, University of Oxford, May 12, 2027, in Izmir, Turkey, 2027
Ancient arrowheads were found in relatively large quantities in the entire Mediterranean, from Sp... more Ancient arrowheads were found in relatively large quantities in the entire Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria and Egypt to France. However, the spectrum of the arrowheads recovered from Anatolia, the Near East, the Black Sea area and the Balkans is very varied, and reflects different characteristics.
So far the study of this material group has been overlooked, whereas there is still a huge amount of unpublished material from excavations, field surveys and museums in the entire ancient world. In our e-meeting in 2027 we attempt to set out a comprehensive model for the study of arrowheads, including their definition, typology, chronology, contexts, function, regional characteristics, production and distribution patterns in the ancient world, and more particularly in the Mediterranean, the Near East, the Black Sea area and the Balkans, and will include catapults, arrow points, missile projectiles, catapult balls and lithoboloi. The increasing number of recent finds in these areas over the last thirty years, thanks to the development of preventive archaeology, has tended to challenge our previous observations and assumptions on arrowheads.
It is also our intention to create a complete bibliography of previous publications on arrowheads for several areas and chronologies.
We warmly invite contributions by scholars and graduate students from a variety of disciplines related to this material group. Intended to bring together scholars of archaeology to discuss a range of issues concerning this material group’s characteristics, this video conference should be an excellent opportunity to increase our knowledge about ancient arrowheads. The following theme groups relate to the main questions the conference aims to address:
- Graeco-Roman arrowheads in comparison with the arrowheads of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic periods, Bronze and Iron Ages,
- Graeco-Roman arrowheads in comparison with the Minoan and Mycenaean arrowheads,
- Etymology of arrowheads in ancient Near Eastern, eastern Mediterranean and Aegean languages,
- Ancient Greek, Latin and Byzantine textual sources on arrowheads,
- Arrowhead depictions on ancient Greek and Roman visual sources,
- Typological evolution and design of arrowheads,
- Chronologies of these objects,
- Manufacturing techniques, manufacturing tools, major production centres and workshops of arrowheads, their organisation and interactions,
- Distribution of arrowheads,
- Typological and functional features of arrowheads,
- Identification of the economic factors that contributed to the standardization in the shell-working,
- Conservation of arrowheads, especially excavated finds: current strategies and future approaches,
- Archaeometric analyses of these objects,
- Miscellanea.
On these themes and questions, all approaches and methods possible to bring some progress to our current knowledge are welcome: archaeological artefacts, archaeological small finds, archaeological science, ancient history, history of art and cultural anthropology etc.
This video conference took place on 12th of May 2027 virtually on Zoom and physically in Buca, Izmir, Turkey. All the lectures and discussions in our e-conference were in English, and were recorded for later viewing on YouTube for participants who were unable to attend the live performance. The YouTube links of the e-conference can be found on p. xx below. The symposium was first announced in December 2025 (Fig. 1). Between December 2025 and February 2027 there were more than xx paper applications from xx countries, including – in alphabetical order – Austria, Australia, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, UK and USA, xx of which were accepted as a lecture to be presented at our symposium (Figs 2–3). Thematically papers were divided into xx sessions, dealing with different aspects of arrowheads (cf. the program below). This book was arranged mainly in April 2027 when papers were placed in alphabetical order by the author names. It was constantly being updated in its online version on our Academia account. Revised papers will be published in 2027 in Archaeology of western Anatolia 4, cf. .
Several international archaeological meetings under the series of Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea, Congressus internationales Smyrnenses were organized in Izmir, and after the current meeting these annual meetings will be organized in electronic form regularly every second Wednesday of May (for a list of past meetings and their publications in the series of Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea, Acta congressus communis omnium gentium Smyrnae, please cf. at the end of this book). Posters for our other 2026 and 2027 e-conferences are to be found at the end of this book as well.
This e-conference is dedicated to the contributions made to Mediterranean archaeology by Martin Henig, who is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford.
I would like to thank following colleagues for preparation of this book (in alphabetic order): Dr Maurizio Buora (Udine), Professor Martin Henig (Oxford / Geneva), Ms Leyla Özlüoğlu (Izmir), Professor Erwin Pochmarski (Graz) and Professor Hugo Thoen (Ghent / Deinze).
Journal articles by Leyla OZLUOGLU
E. Laflı and M. Henig, Graeco-Roman gems with harvesting scenes, Старинар / Starinar, 2025
The full form of this article will be displayed in Academia soon, as it can be filed on freely ac... more The full form of this article will be displayed in Academia soon, as it can be filed on freely accessible online archives no earlier than two years after the release of its journal. Please e-mail me for more information: [email protected]
This paper describes and discusses gems we have located in Turkish collections relevant to the growth and harvesting of crops. Throughout the Mediterranean area and beyond, the most important aspect was the harvesting of cereals associated with the goddess Demeter or, in the West, Ceres (see Henig 2025). She is always shown holding ears of cereal, and is sometimes depicted on green coloured gems indicative of the growing crop, though sometimes stones with a brown streak on them imply grain ready for harvesting. Of equal importance was the grape vine and the vintage, which is often shown, but almost always with erotes (cupids) as the harvesters of the grapes, probably because they were included in the Dionysiac thiasus, and Dionysus (Bacchus) was the god of wine. We have not so far found a good example in Turkey, though there must be many that show the scene, and have depicted an example from the other end of the Empire, from well beyond the vine growing area. However, that is a reminder of connectivity within the vast Empire which is reflected in exports of amphorae containing wine, including from Turkey. We represent the subject with representations of wine vessels, grapes and vine leaves as well as of the god himself who is often portrayed on amethyst which was believed to be the colour of wine and a specific against inebriation (cf. Laflı, Henig 2023, 300–301, cat. nos. 2 and 4, 315, pl. 2, figs 2 and 4). The third major harvested crop is the olive, harvested from ancient trees with long sticks, and again widely exported, employed for cooking and or cosmetics. An ancient Hebrew Psalm (Psalm 104, 15) praises “wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man’s heart”.
In our survey we have given particular attention to the date palm, as our rarest gem depicts a harvest which was particular to the East Mediterranean and especially the Levantine coast. Indeed, it was even employed as a symbol, for example on Jewish coins in the Early Roman period, alongside the other staple crops. Dates would have been something of a staple itself in the region and dates were widely exported to Italy and beyond.
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Conference Presentations by Leyla OZLUOGLU
In this paper, we deal with a red slip ware found in 2001 and 2002. The paper continues previous reports on the same material published, which examined some stamped decoration on these sherds. The focus of the present paper is to provide a corpus of whole stamped decoration classified in these vessels.
The ornamented examples in our corpus consist of 263 decorated amorphous and base/body sherds. Some of the samples bear roulette decoration on their rim and lip edges. Others have triangular, inverted triangular, round, and drop-shaped ornaments, either alone or in combination, in single, double, or multi-row roulette decoration. The stamped decorations were probably crafted with motifs prepared in wood or other material moulds. Sometimes the same decoration appears in identical proportions, size, and form, suggesting that they may have been produced in the same workshop, if not by the same potter. At other times, the motif is similar but with varying proportions and sizes. This feature indicates the existence and activities of various workshops during the Late Roman period.
Keywords: western Anatolia, Turkey, eastern Mediterranean, stamped decoration, Late Roman–Early Byzantine pottery, classical archaeology.
In this online presentation on Zoom focus was a Late Ottoman Greek Orthodox church in Bodrum. Bodrum is a port and touristic city in the province of Muğla in South-western Turkey, ancient Caria. Known in Greek, Roman and Byzantine times as Halicarnassus, not much is known about Post-Medieval and Ottoman Bodrum: in 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the base of the Crusader knights on the neighbouring Rhodes, who left the Castle of Saint Peter and Bodrum to the Ottoman Empire. It is obvious that since the early 16th century until 1940s there was a Greek minority living in Halicarnassus and not much is known about this isolated community, as Bodrum was a quiet town of fishermen and sponge divers until the early 20th century. From 1867 until 1922, it was part of the Aidin Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. There are many Post-Byzantine Greek churches and chapels in different parts of the Bodrum Peninsula. A Greek Orthodox church was built in Bodrum in AD 1780 and re-built in 1873 and dedicated to St Nicholas, considered the patron saint of children and sailors, probably because of its distance to the harbour. This largest Greek church of the town was built in a 370 square meter in the center of Bodrum and is located in Hilmi Uran Square on Cumhuriyet (Republic) Street in the Çarşı (Central) District, that is known as Bodrum's old town. After the Graeco-Turkish exchange in 1923, it was used as a sponge warehouse, cinema, theater performance area, wedding hall, electricity production factory and even a mosque for a period of 46 years. It was severely damaged in the earthquake of 1944. It was demolished between 1965 and 1969 because of the danger of a possible collapse. At that time dynamite was used on its walls, which could not be demolished with a pick and shovel. The walls of the first floor, however, managed to survive. The public education building, which was used for the last 40 years, was erected on the walls of the first floor that survived in 1969.
Restoration of the church is a project that has been planned since the 2000s. In 2019, according to a statement made by Mayor of Bodrum, necessary permissions were obtained from the Board of Monuments in Muğla for the restoration of the church.
There are few inscriptions in the Nautical Museum of Bodrum, related to this building, one of which is a building inscription. The text of the inscription is as follows: ΔΙΑ ΣΥΝΔΡΟΜΗΣ ΤΩΝ / ΦΙΛΟΧΡΙΣΤΩΝ ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑ/ΝΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΔΙ' ΕΠΙΣΤΑΣΙΑΣ ΚΩ/ΝΣΤΑΝΤ(ΙΝΟΥ) ΑΝΤΩΝΙΟΥ
ΩΚΟΔ/ΟΜΗ(ΘΗ Ο ΝΑ)ΟΣ ΟΥΤΟΣ ΤΗΣ / ΘΕΟ(ΤΟΚΟΥ ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣΟΔ)ΙΩΝ * / ....... (c.16 characters) .......ΕΝ / .Τ........... ΤΖΙΚΙ.
Translation. With the contribution of the Christ loving Christians
and with the supervision of Konstantinos Antoniou this church of the Entrance of Mother of God (Theotokos) in the Temple was built * / ....... (c.16 characters) .......ΕΝ / .Τ........... ΤΖΙΚΙ.
Epigraphic comments. Unfortunately the text in the last two lines (with - probably - the date of the building) is too destroyed to read.
In this paper the focus will be given to this church in the regards of Ottoman history, art history, archaeology and epigraphy.
Congressus internationales Smyrnenses by Leyla OZLUOGLU
So far the study of this material group has been overlooked, whereas there is still a huge amount of unpublished material from excavations, field surveys and museums in the entire ancient world. In our e-meeting in 2027 we attempt to set out a comprehensive model for the study of arrowheads, including their definition, typology, chronology, contexts, function, regional characteristics, production and distribution patterns in the ancient world, and more particularly in the Mediterranean, the Near East, the Black Sea area and the Balkans, and will include catapults, arrow points, missile projectiles, catapult balls and lithoboloi. The increasing number of recent finds in these areas over the last thirty years, thanks to the development of preventive archaeology, has tended to challenge our previous observations and assumptions on arrowheads.
It is also our intention to create a complete bibliography of previous publications on arrowheads for several areas and chronologies.
We warmly invite contributions by scholars and graduate students from a variety of disciplines related to this material group. Intended to bring together scholars of archaeology to discuss a range of issues concerning this material group’s characteristics, this video conference should be an excellent opportunity to increase our knowledge about ancient arrowheads. The following theme groups relate to the main questions the conference aims to address:
- Graeco-Roman arrowheads in comparison with the arrowheads of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic periods, Bronze and Iron Ages,
- Graeco-Roman arrowheads in comparison with the Minoan and Mycenaean arrowheads,
- Etymology of arrowheads in ancient Near Eastern, eastern Mediterranean and Aegean languages,
- Ancient Greek, Latin and Byzantine textual sources on arrowheads,
- Arrowhead depictions on ancient Greek and Roman visual sources,
- Typological evolution and design of arrowheads,
- Chronologies of these objects,
- Manufacturing techniques, manufacturing tools, major production centres and workshops of arrowheads, their organisation and interactions,
- Distribution of arrowheads,
- Typological and functional features of arrowheads,
- Identification of the economic factors that contributed to the standardization in the shell-working,
- Conservation of arrowheads, especially excavated finds: current strategies and future approaches,
- Archaeometric analyses of these objects,
- Miscellanea.
On these themes and questions, all approaches and methods possible to bring some progress to our current knowledge are welcome: archaeological artefacts, archaeological small finds, archaeological science, ancient history, history of art and cultural anthropology etc.
This video conference took place on 12th of May 2027 virtually on Zoom and physically in Buca, Izmir, Turkey. All the lectures and discussions in our e-conference were in English, and were recorded for later viewing on YouTube for participants who were unable to attend the live performance. The YouTube links of the e-conference can be found on p. xx below. The symposium was first announced in December 2025 (Fig. 1). Between December 2025 and February 2027 there were more than xx paper applications from xx countries, including – in alphabetical order – Austria, Australia, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Serbia, Turkey, UK and USA, xx of which were accepted as a lecture to be presented at our symposium (Figs 2–3). Thematically papers were divided into xx sessions, dealing with different aspects of arrowheads (cf. the program below). This book was arranged mainly in April 2027 when papers were placed in alphabetical order by the author names. It was constantly being updated in its online version on our Academia account. Revised papers will be published in 2027 in Archaeology of western Anatolia 4, cf. .
Several international archaeological meetings under the series of Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea, Congressus internationales Smyrnenses were organized in Izmir, and after the current meeting these annual meetings will be organized in electronic form regularly every second Wednesday of May (for a list of past meetings and their publications in the series of Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea, Acta congressus communis omnium gentium Smyrnae, please cf. at the end of this book). Posters for our other 2026 and 2027 e-conferences are to be found at the end of this book as well.
This e-conference is dedicated to the contributions made to Mediterranean archaeology by Martin Henig, who is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford.
I would like to thank following colleagues for preparation of this book (in alphabetic order): Dr Maurizio Buora (Udine), Professor Martin Henig (Oxford / Geneva), Ms Leyla Özlüoğlu (Izmir), Professor Erwin Pochmarski (Graz) and Professor Hugo Thoen (Ghent / Deinze).
Journal articles by Leyla OZLUOGLU
This paper describes and discusses gems we have located in Turkish collections relevant to the growth and harvesting of crops. Throughout the Mediterranean area and beyond, the most important aspect was the harvesting of cereals associated with the goddess Demeter or, in the West, Ceres (see Henig 2025). She is always shown holding ears of cereal, and is sometimes depicted on green coloured gems indicative of the growing crop, though sometimes stones with a brown streak on them imply grain ready for harvesting. Of equal importance was the grape vine and the vintage, which is often shown, but almost always with erotes (cupids) as the harvesters of the grapes, probably because they were included in the Dionysiac thiasus, and Dionysus (Bacchus) was the god of wine. We have not so far found a good example in Turkey, though there must be many that show the scene, and have depicted an example from the other end of the Empire, from well beyond the vine growing area. However, that is a reminder of connectivity within the vast Empire which is reflected in exports of amphorae containing wine, including from Turkey. We represent the subject with representations of wine vessels, grapes and vine leaves as well as of the god himself who is often portrayed on amethyst which was believed to be the colour of wine and a specific against inebriation (cf. Laflı, Henig 2023, 300–301, cat. nos. 2 and 4, 315, pl. 2, figs 2 and 4). The third major harvested crop is the olive, harvested from ancient trees with long sticks, and again widely exported, employed for cooking and or cosmetics. An ancient Hebrew Psalm (Psalm 104, 15) praises “wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man’s heart”.
In our survey we have given particular attention to the date palm, as our rarest gem depicts a harvest which was particular to the East Mediterranean and especially the Levantine coast. Indeed, it was even employed as a symbol, for example on Jewish coins in the Early Roman period, alongside the other staple crops. Dates would have been something of a staple itself in the region and dates were widely exported to Italy and beyond.