Ufuk Kocabaş spent his summers swimming, snorkeling and eventually diving around nearby Marmara Island, where his grandfather and other forebears plied the sea as sailors. At age 14, he stumbled upon his first shipwreck, littered with pieces of amphora — an ancient type of storage and transport container — and got an early lesson in proper archaeological practice. “I took some amphora fragments [from the ship] to my sister who was studying at university,” recalls Kocabaş, now head of the Istanbul University Conservation Department. “She told me I shouldn’t have taken them from the site, that I should have left them where they were. At the time, I thought this was stupid. It’s my amphora!”
After chiding him, Kocabaş’s sister helped him identify the type of amphora he found. It dated to the seventh century, and they passed the information they’d ascertained about the shipwreck to a museum. “It was an amazing experience,” Kocabaş says. “I started to read about shipwrecks then, and haven’t stopped since.”
There would be plenty more amphorae and sunken vessels in Kocabaş’s future. In 2005, shortly after receiving his doctorate in ancient history, he was tapped to help lead an urban archaeological excavation in his home city. The dig has revealed perhaps the world’s largest collection of Byzantine shipwrecks, along with rare burial structures, the bones of dozens of animal species and thousands of prehistoric human footprints. All told, 35,000 artifacts dating as far back as the Neolithic period — from ceramics to coins, combs to cooking utensils — have been uncovered, providing new insights into daily life, trading routes and the age of the city itself.
The thought of such riches being found underfoot is hard to imagine while crossing the broad expanse of concrete that now leads to the Yenikapı subway station in central Istanbul. About a third of a mile from the sea today, the unshaded spot is scorching in summer and surrounded by construction cranes and boxy low-rise apartment blocks cheaply built in the 1980s. But from the fourth to the 11th century, it was a flourishing commercial and military harbor, the largest of the early Byzantine period. Trading ships from as far away as Crimea, North Africa and the Balkans pulled into port carrying wine, ivory, leather, ceramics, grain, construction materials, even exotic animals, from one distant end of the empire to another. “The existence of the Port of Theodosius was known from written sources — from the writings of historians and voyagers — but we had no idea about its exact location or dimensions,” Kocabaş explains while sitting in his lab, a nondescript warehouse near the Yenikapı dig site.
