Ulucak Höyük holds the earliest farming village known within the boundaries of İzmir and one of the oldest settlements in western Anatolia. It lies at Ulucak, seven kilometres northwest of Kemalpaşa, at the fifteenth kilometre of the Bornova–Ankara road that runs east from İzmir.
Excavation began in 1995 and has identified three cultural levels: late Roman and early Byzantine settlement at the top, Early Bronze Age layers beneath, and at the bottom a late Neolithic settlement. The Neolithic is why archaeologists come. This is the age when people in the Near East first settled in one place and began to grow crops and keep animals instead of hunting and gathering, and that change spread west quickly enough to reach the whole of Europe within about four thousand years. How and when it arrived in western Anatolia and the Aegean had long been largely guesswork. Ulucak answered the question: the excavation uncovered a thousand-year sequence of occupation, roughly 7000 to 6000 BC, which makes the site a key crossing point between Anatolia, the Near East and Europe.
What that sequence shows is a community making deliberate choices. They picked the Kemalpaşa plain, fertile and well watered, and farmed wheat and barley on it. They kept sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. They lived in houses of woven branches daubed with mud, and they painted their floors red. In the oldest level ovens and hearths can be seen along with rooms built mostly for the work of daily life, and alongside them spaces that served particular purposes.
The excavations brought to light a great many pottery vessels together with flint tools, stone weapons, figurines of the mother goddess and anthropomorphic vessels; some of these are displayed in the İzmir Archaeological Museum. One detail says more about the period than the rest put together: the raw material for their stone tools came from Melos, an island in the Aegean. The first farmers here were not isolated villagers but part of a network that already crossed open water.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İzmir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (146 mm) and lightest in July (4 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
