A clay vessel buried at a Hittite settlement outside Ankara has produced what officials are calling the oldest known seed remains of a flower that now survives in only one small patch of Turkiye. The find links a plant currently listed as highly restricted and closely monitored to a landscape that people were already living in roughly 4,000 years ago, long before Ankara existed as a city at all.
A Hittite vessel from Kulhoyuk
The seeds turned up inside a vessel roughly 4,000 years old, unearthed at the Hittite settlement of Kulhoyuk in central Turkiye. Turkiye’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced the discovery, describing the remains as the world’s oldest known seed traces of Sevgi Cicegi, an endemic flower that still grows today in Ankara’s Golbasi district.
Known to botanists as Centaurea tchihatcheffii, the plant survives within an unusually narrow range centered on the Golbasi area, the same district where Kulhoyuk has preserved thousands of years of continuous human occupation. That overlap is what makes the discovery notable: a species now regarded as one of Ankara’s most distinctive and vulnerable endemic plants appears to have been part of the landscape inhabited by communities at Kulhoyuk roughly four millennia ago.
A settlement on an ancient route south
Kulhoyuk rises near the modern village of Oyaca in Golbasi district, about eight kilometers from the Hittite monument of Gavurkale. The mound measures roughly 250 by 150 metres and reaches about 22 metres in height, preserving occupation stretching back some 5,000 years to the third millennium BCE. The settlement began in the Hattian period before developing into a significant Hittite center during the second millennium BCE, positioned along a network of military and commercial routes leading south from central Anatolia toward the Cilician Gates and onward into Syria and Mesopotamia.
Archaeologists working the site have documented massive cyclopean fortification walls, three postern structures and part of a monumental building, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. A Mitanni-style cylinder seal and a clay sealing bearing Hittite hieroglyphic signs found at Kulhoyuk point to the connections the settlement maintained with the broader political and cultural world of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The site first drew archaeological attention after illegal digging in 1978, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations subsequently carried out rescue excavations across 14 seasons between 1992 and 2006. A new excavation program began in 2021 under Associate Professor Derya Yilmaz Tekin of Ankara University, and it is that ongoing work which produced the seed find.
A flower confined to one corner of Ankara
Sevgi Cicegi is an annual plant in the Asteraceae family, capable of flowering in shades of red, pink and purple, and known locally by names including yanardoner, gelin dugmesi and peygamber cicegi. Official environmental records describe it as an extremely localized endemic species whose surviving natural distribution centers on the Golbasi area around Ankara. Conservation efforts around nearby Mogan Lake have included population counts, seed collection and attempts to protect the limited areas where the species can still reproduce naturally, and the flower received geographical indication status as the “Golbasi Sevgi Cicegi” in 2019.
Seeds preserved inside a Bronze Age vessel push that modern conservation story back by thousands of years. Archaeobotanical remains of this kind can reveal details easily missed by monumental archaeology alone, including what plants grew around a settlement, what people collected from the surrounding landscape, and how ancient communities interacted with the seasonal rhythms of their environment.
A plant with a possible place in Hittite ritual
Flowers and the arrival of spring also carried religious weight in Hittite tradition. One of the kingdom’s major festivals, the AN.TAH.SUM celebration, took its name directly from a plant, and the festivities could last as long as 38 days, involving the king and royal court traveling between important cult centers including Hattusa, Arinna, Katapa and Ankuwa while offerings, music and ceremonies honored numerous deities.
The exact botanical identity of the AN.TAH.SUM plant remains debated among scholars, with earlier proposals including crocus or saffron, and no identification has gained full acceptance. There is currently no evidence tying the Sevgi Cicegi seeds from Kulhoyuk to that specific festival, and their presence inside the vessel may simply reflect an ordinary, practical use. Still, the broader Hittite context underscores that plants were never mere background scenery in Bronze Age life; they were woven into agriculture, food, medicine and seasonal religious observance.
The same landscape, four thousand years apart
Kulhoyuk has largely been defined through its architecture up to this point, from fortification walls and passageways to monumental structures and objects reflecting far-flung contacts across Anatolia. The seed discovery shifts the scale of what the site can tell researchers. Walls reveal how a Hittite settlement defended itself, and seals reveal networks of power and trade, but a handful of preserved seeds brings the surrounding natural landscape directly into the archaeological record.
Sevgi Cicegi still blooms in Golbasi today, in the same general area where the ancient vessel was buried. That continuity may end up being the most striking part of the find: an endemic flower now confined to a single small corner of Ankara appears to trace its presence in that landscape back to the age of the Hittites, thousands of years before anyone had reason to worry about its survival.
This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.
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