Beneath the modern streets of İzmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, excavators working through the layered remains of the ancient port city of Smyrna have uncovered a small room paved with an intricate late-Roman mosaic floor. At its center sits a knotted geometric pattern that people across the ancient Mediterranean believed could ward off misfortune.
The find came during ongoing digs along one of the ancient city’s main thoroughfares, part of a broader Turkish government effort to research archaeological remains hidden beneath densely built modern neighborhoods.
A Street Excavation Beneath Modern İzmir
The mosaic-floored room turned up on Agora North Street, one of Smyrna’s principal roads, during excavations led by Akin Ersoy of İzmir Katip Çelebi University, according to Archaeology Magazine. The work falls under Turkey’s “Heritage for the Future” initiative, which funds year-round excavation of archaeological layers trapped beneath contemporary cities. Smyrna’s main digs have historically concentrated on the ancient agora and theater, the two central hubs of civic life in a classical port city, making a residential or semi-public find along a side street a comparatively rare addition to the record.
A City Rebuilt Layer Upon Layer
Smyrna’s location has been continuously inhabited and rebuilt for thousands of years, which is precisely what makes excavating beneath modern İzmir so difficult and so rewarding. The city was reconstructed as a planned urban center in the centuries following Alexander the Great, replacing an earlier settlement that had stood nearby since the Bronze Age. Streets, sewer lines, colonnades and public buildings from that Hellenistic and Roman rebuilding still lie beneath the foundations of the modern city, meaning that any excavation has to work around active streets, utilities and private property rather than an open field. That constraint is part of why the “Heritage for the Future” framework matters: it gives archaeologists a standing mandate and funding stream to investigate these buried layers piecemeal, street segment by street segment, rather than waiting for a single large-scale dig.
Reading the Room’s Geometry and Its Central Knot
The floor measures roughly three meters by four meters and is built from interlocking twelve-sided geometric panels, a decorative style common during the Late Roman period, according to Archaeology News. At the design’s center sits a Solomon’s Knot: a motif formed from intertwined loops that has no beginning or end when traced. Archaeologists date the building housing the mosaic to between the fourth and sixth centuries C.E., a period when Smyrna functioned as a well-planned urban center rebuilt in the centuries following Alexander the Great.
A Symbol That Crosses Religions and Centuries
The Solomon’s Knot appears across many cultures and eras and is most commonly read as an apotropaic symbol — one meant to protect people and spaces from misfortune, envy and the evil eye. Around the central knot, the floor includes plant motifs, geometric ornaments and small cross figures. Crosses later became closely tied to Christian iconography, and their presence alongside a much older protective symbol illustrates how traditional visual conventions coexisted with an emerging religious symbolism during Late Antiquity. Researchers believe the combined imagery was chosen primarily to spiritually protect the building and the people who used it, though whether the space served as a private residence or a semi-public room remains unclear.
The same knotted pattern shows up far beyond Smyrna. Versions of the Solomon’s Knot appear in mosaics from Roman North Africa to Byzantine churches, including a well-documented example in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and in decorative traditions stretching into Islamic art, Celtic knotwork and Chinese design long after the Roman period ended. That geographic spread suggests the motif traveled along the same trade and cultural routes that connected Smyrna to the rest of the Mediterranean world, rather than developing as a purely local invention. Its durability as a protective symbol across so many centuries and belief systems is part of what makes its reappearance in a single excavated room in İzmir useful to researchers piecing together how residents of the city thought about safety, luck and the supernatural in their everyday surroundings.
A Floor Uncovered Twice, 1,500 Years Apart
One of the more unusual details to emerge from the excavation is evidence that the mosaic had already been rediscovered once before, long after antiquity. In the nineteenth century, builders working on a non-Muslim hospital complex or nearby residences constructed directly over the ancient floor. Traces of wall plaster applied on top of the mosaic indicate that nineteenth-century builders uncovered, recognized and deliberately incorporated the ancient design into their own structures, keeping it visible and in use centuries after the room’s original purpose had been forgotten.
Why Another Mosaic Room Is Rare in Smyrna
Mosaic floors are scarce finds at Smyrna specifically — researchers there have recorded only a handful over the decades, and the last comparable discovery came roughly 70 years before this one. That rarity is part of why archaeologists on the project describe the newly uncovered room as a significant event rather than a routine addition to the site’s catalog. Excavations at Smyrna were expected to expand further in 2026, and researchers involved in the project have said they hope additional rooms or structures connected to this one will eventually surface as the work along Agora North Street continues.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
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