Turkey: eight 5,000-year-old loaves of bread go on show in Kütahya
· BehindLines newsroom
Eight loaves of bread about 5,000 years old, preserved because a fire charred them, are now on public display at the Kütahya Archaeology and Mining Museum in western Turkey. The newspaper Türkiye Today reported on it on 5 November 2026, and The History Blog published the news on 8 November.
A kitchen stopped in its tracks
According to Türkiye Today, the loaves were found during rescue excavations at Seyitömer Mound, in an Early Bronze Age room, between the legs of a shelf and near an oven. Remains of wheat and lentils lay in the same place. Sevgi Gürdal, director of the Kütahya museum and lead archaeologist, explains that a fire made a storage shelf collapse and mixed the bread, grain and pulses that had been kept in sacks or bags. The History Blog specifies that the find dates from last year.
A site dug since 1989
Türkiye Today says the mound is 26 metres high, 140 wide and 150 long, 26 kilometres from the centre of Kütahya. Rescue excavations began there in 1989 to clear the ground for lignite extraction. More than 17,000 objects have been handed to the museum, which has run the work since 2019. The paper dates the find to the first quarter of the Early Bronze Age, around 3000 BC in the region.
What it brings
Sevgi Gürdal says Seyitömer supplies a large share of the objects shown in the region's museums, and that these pieces inform us about daily and social life, artistic taste and eating habits of the time. The loaves, according to Türkiye Today, are among the museum's most popular finds.
For visitors, it is a rare chance to see what people ate five millennia ago. The History Blog gives no precise dates for the display: the text says only that the loaves are shown to the public for the first time.