ANKARA

Türkiye’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced on Saturday that the exhibition titled “Building Community: Gobeklitepe, Tas Tepeler and Life 12,000 Years Ago” will open in Berlin, showcasing selected artifacts from the Sanliurfa Museum.

Ersoy said on the Turkish social media platform NSosyal that the exhibition will open on Feb. 10 and will present 89 artifacts and four replicas from the Sanliurfa Museum to an international audience, noting that 44 of the works will be exhibited for the first time.

Ersoy said the exhibition will run until July 19 and will also include photographs of Tas Tepeler taken by renowned photographer Isabel Munoz, adding that the display will narrate humanity’s major transformation during the Neolithic Age in the heart of Berlin.

According to a statement from the ministry, the exhibition has been prepared in cooperation with the Culture and Tourism Ministry and the Vorderasiatisches Museum of the Berlin State Museums and will be hosted at the James-Simon Galerie on Museum Island in Berlin.

The exhibition will explore the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled life and food production, addressing architecture, art, sculpture, belief systems and the emergence of social organization through temples, stone pillars, reliefs and figurative sculptures from Gobeklitepe and its surroundings.

Visitors will have the opportunity to closely examine early social rituals, the first religious beliefs and forms of community organization, as well as the broader social and economic transformation that accompanied the rise of agriculture.

Photographs by Isabel Munoz, capturing Tas Tepeler through an artistic lens, will also be featured, offering a contemporary interpretation of Neolithic life and landscapes.

The Berlin exhibition, to be held for the first time in the city, aims to highlight the cultural and scientific significance of Gobeklitepe and the surrounding Tas Tepeler on an international platform, further increasing their visibility in Europe following earlier exhibitions, including one at the Colosseum in Rome.

The exhibition will remain open to visitors until July 19.

*Writing by Merve Berker