He was born in 1911 in the village of Tulkarm near Haifa. He descended from a rooted family, several of whose members assumed high positions in the Ottoman bureaucracy. The village of Tulkarm itself became a well-known name in the world of archaeology as the birth place of Ekrem Akurgal besides being close to the location of the ancient site of Caesarea. His surname, Akurgal, he chose after the Surname Law of the Turkish Republic, derives from an ancient and forgetten language spoken once in those lands, the Sumerian, meaning (A-kur-gal) (the) Great Land (of) Water i.e., Anatolia.

E. Akurgal spent his childhood in Istanbul and then he went to Germany to study Archaeology. When he returned to Turkey, he worked ardently for the establishment of Classical Archaeology as a field of study. Ekrem Akurgal has been the master teacher in the field being the teacher of most of the actual and retired professors teaching and chairing in the universities’ departments of Archaeology in Turkey. His contributions to archaeology have been of more universal value. He specialized in Anatolia and in the transitions between the Mesopotamian and the Greek and Roman civilizations. His works such as Orient und Okzident (The Orient and the Occident), his research on the Anatolian civilizations and on the genesis of the Greek culture still serve as fundamental reference works for those who are willing to study in these fields.

He had to resign from his position in the Turkish Historical Society as many other prominent intellectuals did after the 1980 military coup due to mistreatment towards scholars and scholarly research. "After the nationalization of the Turkish Historical Society in 1983, the historical and archaeological research lost its quality. Young Turkish scholars we educated carry on their research in Europe as far as they can."

Following the suggestion of Aziz Nesin, E.Akurgal took initiative to found the Turkish- Greek Friendship Organization with the participation of forty-eight intellectuals in the 1980s when masses were loudly crying out for war between Turkey and Greece. "The Turkish Press was recurrently comparing the defensive and offensive forces of Turkey and Greece. There were no single word about the history, language and sociology of the Greek nation who lived together with the Turks for centuries."

For detailed information we recommend you to refer to "Bir Arkeoloğun Anıları: Ekrem Akurgal ( Memoirs of an Archaeologist: Ekrem Akurgal) published by Tüba Publications.