He was born on March 30, 1911, in the town of
Tulkarm in the
Beirut Vilayet of the
Ottoman Empire (today a
Palestinian city in the
West Bank), where his mother's family owned a large farm. He descended from a family of
Ottoman intellectuals and religious men, several of whose members had assumed the office of
mufti, the highest title of the
Islamic clergy in a given region, for the Ottoman province of
Herzegovina. His family moved back to
Istanbul when he was two years old. For some time, they resided in another family farm, this time near
Akyazı. He received his first education from his father's sister and her husband, who taught literature in
Darülfünun. Akurgal graduated in 1931 from
Istanbul High School for Boys and, having earned a state scholarship, went to the
University of Berlin in Germany to study archaeology. In a made in 1990, the interviewer was to remark that, now and then, his
German was still unmistakably tainted with
Berlinerisch. In 1957, he became a
professor in the
University of Ankara. He worked mainly in the
Aegean Region, starting the research on
Phokaia (
Foça),
Pitane (
Çandarlı),
Erythrai (
Ildırı) and old Smyrna (
Bayraklı tumulus). He published numerous books on
ancient Greek,
Hittite and other ancient civilizations of
Anatolia. Settled in
İzmir since the seventies to pursue his work on the nearby sites with more effectiveness, Akurgal died on November 1, 2002, in
İzmir. His work and legacy is being carried on by his wife, Meral Akurgal, an accomplished archaeologist herself and his closest assistant in his lifetime. ==Awards==