Sayburç is to become an open-air museum

In August 2026, Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced that Türkiye plans to turn Sayburç into an open-air museum. The announcement followed a meeting with Prof. Dr. Necmi Karul, coordinator of the Taş Tepeler project, and ministry officials, focused on the latest work at Sayburç and neighbouring Karahan Tepe.

A season that reached about seventy structures

The plan comes after Sayburç's sixth excavation season, directed by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Eylem Özdoğan of Istanbul University, uncovered around seventy well-preserved houses and other structures across an area of about 2,700 square metres. The season also produced reliefs, human sculptures, monumental T-shaped standing stones, and stone bases carved with human faces — adding to the evidence for how Neolithic communities here made art and organised daily life.

As in earlier seasons, the buildings record a shift from circular to rectangular plans, and offer clues to the emergence of the house and the household as ideas. Occupied from the Neolithic through the Roman era and into modern times, Sayburç is what researchers call a "living mound."

What the museum would be

The government plans to preserve the excavated settlement as an open-air museum, while restoring traditional village buildings on nearby land into a separate village museum. The work is part of Türkiye's wider "Heritage to the Future" and Taş Tepeler programmes, which aim to excavate, conserve and present the country's archaeological heritage.

Sayburç sits close to Şanlıurfa's city centre and along the road to Gaziantep, which is expected to make it an important stop on the Taş Tepeler route. For now it remains an active excavation rather than a ticketed site — see our honest guide on how to visit, and where the finds can be seen in the meantime on the museum page.