The question of what to call this site is genuinely interesting. When excavations began in earnest, the archaeologists needed a name for a settlement that appears in no known historical record. They found two ancient references to the region: Pliny the Elder's Natural History names a river feeding the lake as the "Bathynias," and the chronicler Theophanes refers to the local region as "Bathyasos." From these two phonetic threads, researchers assembled the working name "Bathonea" — almost certainly a variant of the name of a hekatostys, a local community division (the Greek word means "Hundred") of either Byzantion or Rhegion. In 1930, the Swiss archaeologist Ernest Mamboury had studied the visible ruins and identified the settlement as Rhegion, a known town. In 2009, a new identification as "Bathonea" was proposed and gained significant public traction — perhaps too much, given the thin evidence. Scholars have since pushed back, noting that the site may never have been an independent city at all.

Whatever its ancient name, the site on the Avcılar peninsula northwest of Lake Küçükçekmece has yielded extraordinary finds. Excavations conducted under Dr. Şengül Aydıngün of Kocaeli University have uncovered the traces of two ancient harbors and a submerged lighthouse within the lake itself — structures consistent with a working port settlement connected to the Byzantine capital, roughly 20 kilometers to the east. An olive oil and wine production complex from Late Antiquity came to light in subsequent seasons, suggesting a community engaged in the kinds of agricultural processing that sustained Byzantine urban life. The lake, which is separated from the Sea of Marmara by a narrow coastal strip, once offered sheltered anchorage. The ruins have always been partially visible — Mamboury noticed them in 1930 — but their full extent only became clear once systematic excavation began.

Among the more startling claims associated with the Bathonea site is that it may once have housed members of the Varangian Guard — the elite Norse warriors who served Byzantine emperors as a personal bodyguard from roughly the tenth century onward. Norse fighters, recruited from Scandinavia and from Rus communities along eastern river routes, were prized for their loyalty, their fighting ability, and their distance from Byzantine court politics. That some settled permanently near Constantinople is well established. Whether Bathonea specifically was one such settlement remains part of the larger debate about the site's identity, but the possibility adds another layer to an already layered story: Norsemen, far from home, living on the shores of a Turkish lake, within sight of the city they had come to protect.

One of the most striking finds at Bathonea came from earthquake archaeology. Excavators identified coins dated to 550 CE alongside structural collapse consistent with a major seismic event — placing a catastrophic earthquake during the reign of Emperor Justinian I (527–565 CE). Beneath the stones of a collapsed dome, archaeologists found skeletons of two individuals who had died with arms around each other. The intimacy of that detail — two people who died together during a disaster in the sixth century, whose last act was to hold onto one another — is the kind of evidence that archaeology occasionally delivers and that no written record preserves. The earthquake at Bathonea is not mentioned in contemporary sources, which is part of why the excavation matters: it adds to the historical record rather than confirming what is already known.

The honest summary of Bathonea is that archaeologists are working at a significant site whose ancient identity remains uncertain. The ruins are real; the finds are substantial. Whether the settlement was an independent city called Bathonea, a community division of Byzantion or Rhegion, a Varangian quarter, or something else entirely may take many more seasons to determine — and may never be resolved with certainty. That uncertainty is part of the site's interest. Lake Küçükçekmece today is ringed by the western suburbs of Istanbul, a body of water caught between the sprawling city and the Marmara coast. Beneath and around it, excavations continue, pulling fragments of a lost world into the light of a question that archaeology keeps asking: what actually happened here, and to whom?