Old fisherman still homesick

The body of a sculpture that was smuggled from Aphrodisias in 1904 is still in Berlin. 

1898: Ottoman Emperor Abdulhamid II provided work permit to French engineer Paul Gaudin to work in a railway construction in the Western Aegean region. He was first employed in the Bursa-Mudanya line and then in the İzmir-Eskişehir line. 

While practicing his mission, he unearthed a cemetery from the Early Bronze Age called the "Yortan culture," his mind delved into archaeology. As you might remember, we announced a short time ago that a Yortan pitcher that was smuggled from Turkey would be returned. It has returned. 

1904-1905: When he was working in Aydın, Gaudin also made excavations in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, which bears the name of Aphrodite. He smuggled many artifacts. 

1905: Gaudin was employed in the Damascus-Medina Hedjaz railway, which has historical and religious significance. 

1914: Like Gaudin, British spy captain T.E. Lawrence carried out excavations as an archeologist in the Hittite city Kargamış, located between Hatay and Gaziantep. 

1917: Railway was one of the targets during the revolt of the Bedouins in Hejaz. The Ottoman army failed to protect the line. Lawrence thought that it was more rationalist to get the rails and locomotives out of service rather than defeat the Ottoman powers. What was built by an amateur archaeologist, Gaudin, was destroyed by an amateur archaeologist Lawrence. 

1921: Gaudin died. 

1922-1931: Mrs. Gaudin sold the artifacts to private collections and museums. 

1926: It was revealed that some artifacts that Gaudin could not achieve to smuggle from Turkey were buried in the garden of one of his relatives in İzmir's Bornova. These artifacts...