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A Day at Çatalhöyük, a Nine Thousand Year Old Town
Historical Sites

A Day at Çatalhöyük, a Nine Thousand Year Old Town

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The road running southeast from Konya soon reaches a flawless plain. Wheat fields, irrigation canals and thin rows of poplars stretch to the horizon, and the mountains stay a pale line in the distance.

Çumra, Konya
Historical Sites
Radar Editör
October 19, 2026

About Trip

The road running southeast from Konya soon reaches a flawless plain. Wheat fields, irrigation canals and thin rows of poplars stretch to the horizon, and the mountains stay a pale line in the distance. In the middle of this plain, a few kilometres north of Çumra, at first sight there is nothing but two low hills standing a little above the fields. Yet those two hills are Çatalhöyük, where people built their houses one on top of another in eighteen successive levels, and which is today one of the most debated Neolithic settlements in the world. This trip devotes a day to those two hills and the plain around them; the aim is not only to look at the excavation but also to understand why the settlement was founded here, how it was discovered and where its finds are kept today.

Two hills on the plain

Çumra is a district set in the heart of the Konya Plain, at an altitude a little above one thousand metres. English Wikipedia notes that the town stands at the centre of the large Çumra irrigation zone established in 1912 and that it is an important station on the historic Istanbul to Baghdad railway. The orderly field pattern you see today is largely the work of that irrigation system. Nine thousand years ago the scene was very different. According to the website of the Çatalhöyük Research Project, when the first settlers arrived the site lay within a wetland under a moist and rainy climate; fish, water birds and their eggs were easy to find, fields spread over the drier ground and herds of wild animals roamed the plain.

The name of the settlement comes from this appearance. The introduction on the Turkish museums website explains that the mound has two summits of different heights and therefore received the adjective "çatal", meaning fork. According to the Culture Portal, the large eastern mound consists of eighteen Neolithic occupation levels dated between 7400 and 6200 BC, while the lower western mound carries the traces of the Chalcolithic Age. The project website says that an arm of the Çarşamba River is thought to have once run through the area between the two mounds, now covered by fields, and that a change in the river's course may have moved people to the western mound. Turkish Wikipedia reports that in its final phase the eastern mound rose about twenty metres above the plain; in other words, almost the whole hill you see is the accumulated remains of houses that were demolished and rebuilt.

The surroundings of Çumra are not limited to Çatalhöyük. Turkish Wikipedia lists dozens of mounds in the district, among them Sırçalıhöyük, Seyithan Höyüğü, Karahöyük and Dedemoğlu Höyüğü. English Wikipedia writes that in 2019 a farmer near Türkmen-Karahöyük found a stone stele written in Luwian hieroglyphs in an irrigation ditch, and that the inscription describes a victory of Great King Hartapu over Phrygia. In this sense the plain can be read like a settlement calendar spanning thousands of years.

Getting there

The Culture Portal places Çatalhöyük 52 kilometres southeast of Konya and 11 kilometres north of Çumra, while the museum introduction gives the distance to the district as 10 kilometres. From Konya it is a flat and easy drive of about an hour by car. Çumra can be reached from Konya by intercity bus and by rail, but the last kilometres between the town centre and the excavation require a car or a taxi. As public transport links can change, check the current information on the websites of the relevant institutions before you set off. Turkish Wikipedia notes that the site lies near the village of Küçükköy, and road signs also point to this village.

Half a century of excavation

According to the Çatalhöyük Research Project, the site was noticed by chance in 1958 by a British team made up of David French, Alan Hall and James Mellaart. Mellaart, with the support of his wife Arlette, planned the excavation. The first season in 1961 lasted thirty nine days, and the team found forty houses together with figurines, pottery and wall paintings. Work continued every summer until 1965, after which the site lay quiet for about thirty years. English Wikipedia recalls that Mellaart excavated close to two hundred buildings in four seasons, whereas his student Ian Hodder, who reopened the excavation years later, devoted an entire season to a single building; this comparison captures the difference in method between the two periods well.

Hodder's team began in the mid 1990s with surface surveys; sources give 1995 or 1996 as the start of the actual excavation. According to the project website, from then on Turkish and international teams worked together every summer. More extensive work on the western mound began in the late 1990s and was continued by two new teams after 2006. Because the excavation areas were exposed to harsh weather, two large protective shelters were built, the southern one in 2002 and 2003 and the northern one in 2007 and 2008; these are the structures visitors see today. The project under Hodder's direction ended in 2018. The project website says that excavations now continue under the direction of Ali Ozan of Pamukkale University and that the physical archive of the twenty five year project is kept at Stanford University Libraries. The site entered the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2009 and was inscribed on the main list in 2012.

What to see on site

The heart of the visit is the mudbrick walls under the protective shelters. The architecture pages of the project website explain that the houses were built against one another without streets between them, that people moved about on the roofs and climbed down into their homes by a wooden ladder through an opening in the ceiling. The main room had an oven beneath the ladder, raised platforms for sleeping and daily tasks, and storage rooms to the side. The walls were plastered white and painted with hunting scenes and geometric patterns. Turkish Wikipedia reports that one hundred and sixty coats were counted in a layer of plaster about three centimetres thick, and that a house was used for roughly eighty years before it was filled in and a new one built on top with the same plan. Standing under the shelter you can clearly pick out these overlapping layers of wall in the sections.

Look out for one detail in particular. Turkish Wikipedia writes that lime was used for plaster in the lower levels, while clay took its place in the upper levels; in the view of the excavation team, burning lime required so much wood that it was gradually abandoned. What looks like an ordinary change of material offers a clue to how a community depleted its environment nine thousand years ago. The project website also describes how around 6500 BC more efficient cooking pots appeared, domestic cattle and milk became common, and population and housing density increased. How many people lived here is debated: the project website speaks of a population of between 3,500 and 8,000 at the peak, while English Wikipedia reports that more recent calculations point to 600 to 800 people in a given year of the middle phase.

Over the years the excavation teams also built an experimentally reconstructed house on site; photographs on the project website show oven firing experiments and exhibition preparations in it. Ask at the entrance whether this building is open during your visit. Then walk towards the western mound: according to the project website, burials beneath houses, wall paintings and the infilling of abandoned houses are not found here, while carefully painted serving vessels appear instead. This shift between the two hills lets you see the change from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic in a single landscape.

The visitor building

Turkish Wikipedia writes that the information and visitor centre, built by Konya Metropolitan Municipality with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, opened in 2023, that it is placed in the area between the two mounds and that it was constructed with a timber structural system. According to English Wikipedia, its exhibition halls present the environment, architecture and daily life of the settlement through interactive displays in Turkish and English. Spending time in this centre before walking up to the excavation is the easiest way to make sense of the cut walls you will see under the shelters.

Following the finds to Konya and Ankara

What you see at Çatalhöyük is walls and sections; the portable finds are elsewhere. The museums website states that the excavation finds are in the Konya Archaeological Museum, part of them on display and the rest kept in storage. According to the Konya Governorship's introduction, the museum, opened in 1962, also holds finds from the Canhasan, Erbaba, Sızma and Karahöyük excavations alongside Çatalhöyük. Turkish Wikipedia writes that a wall painting about three metres long found in the 1963 excavations and interpreted as a plan of the settlement is displayed at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. That interpretation is not undisputed; English Wikipedia reports that some archaeologists read the painting as a leopard skin and a geometric design rather than a map. If you end your Çatalhöyük day with the Archaeological Museum on the way back to Konya, you will have seen in the evening the objects that filled the houses you saw in the morning.

The finds also tell of a distant trade network. According to the project website, obsidian came from Cappadocia and Eastern Anatolia, and some people had connections reaching as far as the Red Sea for baskets and shells. Turkish Wikipedia gives a long list of small finds ranging from belt hooks to obsidian mirrors and stamp seals of baked clay. When you look for them in the display cases, check the labels showing which level each object came from.

Season and time of day

The plain is hot and dry in summer, cold and often snowy in winter. Although the shelters provide shade, the excavation site itself sits on an open flat; spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons for both the view of the plain and walking. Early in the morning the light softens the hills, and there is time to visit the visitor centre and both shelters without hurrying.

Practical notes

The museums website announces that the Museum Card is valid at the site and that the northern shelter section is temporarily closed to visitors. Because restrictions like this and opening hours can change, check the current information on the museums website before you set off. Do not step beyond the barriers at the edge of the sections; the mudbrick walls are fragile. There is little shade on the plain, so take a hat and water. Remember to factor the closing day of the Konya Archaeological Museum into your return plan; the Governorship website says the museum is open every day except Monday, but check the current information all the same.

Sources

Location - A Day at Çatalhöyük, a Nine Thousand Year Old Town

Trip Info
CityÇumra, Konya
TypeHistorical Sites
DateOctober 19, 2026
SourceRadar Editör
Radar TürkiyeAuthorRadar TürkiyeVisit SourceGet Directions