Hatay Necmi Asfuroğlu Archaeology Museum

The Necmi Asfuroğlu Archaeology Museum was created in 2009 to preserve and display the remains found during the excavation for a hotel in the centre of Antakya. It was transferred to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and opened to visitors in 2019, so it is a young museum built around what the ground revealed.

Antakya, ancient Antioch, was founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I, one of Alexander the Great's commanders, and named after his father Antiochus. Through the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods it stayed one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean. In the museum you can see archaeological layers from this 2,300-year history, sometimes overlapping and sometimes interlocking, along with the objects found in them.

The mosaics are the highlight. Roman floor mosaics of various sizes are preserved where they were found, which makes the museum a rare example worldwide. One of them comes from a Roman villa of the 2nd century AD, with a main panel showing the winged horse Pegasus and three nymphs at a ceremony, and three smaller panels below with the Muses and the meeting of the writer Hesiod with the Muse Calliope. Another is a single-piece mosaic of about 1,050 square metres, considered the largest in the world.