From Teacher to Open Air Museum: Naci Akdemir’s Passion for Fossils
Naci Akdemir, 62, graduated from the anthropology department and worked as a teacher and school administrator for 35 years. During this time, his curiosity about nature and interest in fossils led him to create an exhibition that would create an open-air museum in the garden of his house. Akdemir attracts visitors by exhibiting his fossil collection, which began to form approximately 350 million years ago and was completed 5-6 million years ago, in his garden area.
Among the fossils found in his garden are fossils of vertebrate species such as mussels, oysters, echinoderms, snails, devil’s minarets and shark teeth. Akdemir states that in addition to the interesting fossils he has collected for about 30-35 years, there are also jawbones and sulcus bones that he found in the field but could not bring back.
Naci Akdemir, stating that most of these fossils can be found separately or sometimes together in the same rock, continues as follows: “There is a band here that I cannot define. This band appears to be a straight line that is several kilometers long and 50-60 meters wide. The characteristics of the fossils on this line show that animals and plants appear together. Prof. Dr. “Sabri Akdoğan and Kadri Tuzcuoğulları, who conducted studies in these areas, stated that the formation process of these fossils started approximately 350 million years ago and ended 5-6 million years ago.”
Akdemir, conveying the professor’s opinion he received, said, “The incident happened as follows; according to what they said, the land under our feet is moving northward by 10-15 millimeters per year. There is also a rise of 5-6 millimeters When the process started, today’s Kocaköy was under the Tethys Sea. It was where the current Saudi Arabia and Iraq borders were in terms of coordinates. While the Africa-Arabia plate was moving northward, Anatolia did not exist at that time. Both trying to push northward and rising, coming from further east, Eurasia is also resisting these movements and rising. The Alpine-Himalayan fold mountains were formed thanks to this. past, rose and has become land today. Therefore, it is possible to find fossils of living beings whose similarities you see everywhere in the mountain ranges I mentioned.”
Finally, Akdemir concluded his words as follows: “It takes some caution to call it an open-air museum. I bring the fossils I find. I wish there was a place in Kocaköy where both paleontological, archaeological, geological and ethnographic materials could be exhibited; “This would be much better.”
