Temple of Artemis revived in digital environment

The Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, which is one of the seven wonders of the world and whose ruins were looted after being destroyed by the Goths in 263 and which no one could see as a whole, has been revived in the digital world.

Professor Ahmet Denker, who worked for 12 years in museums, especially the British Museum, where the stolen pieces of the Temple of Artemis are kept, revealed how the temple looked when it was built in a digital environment.

During these 12 years in the museums, Denker, who is a lecturer at Bilgi University's Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, worked in the British Museum, the Ephesos Museum in Vienna, the Vatican Museum, the New York Metropolitan Museum, the Kapitoline Museum in Italy and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and found the pieces of Artemis.

This is how Denker's journey that gave life to Artemis began: He spent his childhood in İzmir. He had learned the name of the Temple of Artemis in a story written by the Fisherman of Halicarnassus when he was still in middle school. In his own words, going to Ephesus on a school trip was a complete disappointment for him. The temple was not in its place. When he went to England to do his doctorate in the 1980s, one of the first places he visited was the British Museum.

Visiting the Ionian collection of the museum, he saw two capitals of Artemis, carved from veinless white marble, up to 3 meters in width. There, he decided to do a study about Artemis. While Denker was continuing his studies in Türkiye, computer technologies were developing.

Drawings could be transferred to the computer in 3D, and buildings could be constructed on the screens. Late Ekrem Akurgal, the doyen of Turkish archaeology, wrote in a book that it was possible to...