Archaeologists digging at the agora of ancient Smyrna, in the historic centre of İzmir, have uncovered three rooms from Late Antiquity and wall paintings they say they had not met before at the site. They have also followed part of a Roman-period water channel, and its source has not yet been found. Daily Sabah, working with the Anadolu Agency (AA), reported the finds on 31 August 2026, citing the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality.
Three rooms and a first for the wall paintings
According to Daily Sabah, the excavations at the Smyrna agora are run on behalf of Izmir Katip Çelebi University, with permission from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The three rooms turned up as the team kept digging a mosaic floor uncovered last year. The municipality said two of them have mosaic floors and the third a marble floor.
Excavations around the agora and the ancient theatre also revealed wall paintings. Professor Akın Ersoy, of the university's Department of Turkish-Islamic Archaeology and head of the excavation, put it this way, in Daily Sabah's translation: "We encountered wall paintings in these rooms for the first time. We had never come across them before in the Smyrna Agora or around the theater."
Ersoy said the rooms share characteristics with the Terrace Houses at Ephesus and that the structures may have served a public function. He dated them to the fifth and sixth centuries AD. In his account, the division of the Roman Empire in AD 395 and the spread of Christianity changed the structure of cities, and the new finds are giving information on how Smyrna changed in that period. The public function is his suggestion — he said the structures may have served one — not an established finding.
The Roman water channel
The same excavations traced part of an ancient water channel from the Roman period, which Daily Sabah says is believed to have carried water for nearly 2,000 years. Ersoy said Smyrna's water in the Roman period came through channels connected to springs. By Daily Sabah's report, archaeologists had followed approximately 150 metres (492 feet) of this one but had not yet located its source.
Ersoy's suggestion is that there may have been a spring near the Namazgah Bath and Kurşunlu Mosque, south of the agora, with the water travelling along the channel to reach the agora. That is a hypothesis; the report does not say the spring has been found.
In earlier remarks carried by the Turkish agency DHA in February 2025, Ersoy gave physical detail of the channel. He described the channel reaching the agora as 2.16 metres high and 90 centimetres wide, traceable for 150 metres, and large enough for a person to move through comfortably. He said then that it was still working and that the water flowed even in summer. The team used it to water the agora's lawns, he said, and gave the water to the authorities for the city's parks and gardens. He also said it could not be used as drinking water: analyses, he said, showed nitrate at 1.5 times and arsenic at twice the accepted normal values.
What is settled and what is not
Daily Sabah reported, citing the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality, that three rooms had been found, two with mosaic floors and one with a marble floor; according to excavation head Akın Ersoy, the wall paintings were new to the agora and theatre area and the channel had been followed for about 150 metres. DHA's earlier account, from February 2025, gives the same 150-metre figure. The open questions are the ones Ersoy flagged himself: where the channel's water comes from, and whether the rooms had a public role. A channel Ersoy described as still running in February 2025, with no located source, is a loose end worth watching, and for now it rests on one excavator's hypothesis about a spring.
Sources
Daily Sabah with AA (2026) 'New rooms, wall paintings found at ancient Smyrna in Türkiye', Daily Sabah, 31 August 2026, available at: https://www.dailysabah.com/life/new-rooms-wall-paintings-found-at-ancient-smyrna-in-turkiye/news (Accessed: 14 October 2026).
DHA (2025) 'Antik kentin 2 bin yıllık su kanalları ilk günkü gibi çalışıyor', DHA, 22 February 2025, available at: https://www.dha.com.tr/foto-galeri/antik-kentin-2-bin-yillik-su-kanallari-ilk-gunku-gibi-calisiyor-2588599 (Accessed: 14 October 2026).
Picture credits
- Top picture: The agora of ancient Smyrna in İzmir. The agora of Smyrna — photo: Ian W Scott (CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr) (source)
- The Terrace Houses at Ephesus, whose features Ersoy said the new Smyrna rooms share. Terrace Houses, Ephesus — photo: Satirdan kahraman (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
