Its history dating back millennia, Turkey’s capital, Ankara, is littered with the traces of various civilizations, including Hittites, Phrygians and Romans. Many of those historical remains, however, were obscured by government buildings, roads and brothels built over them. Some of those constructions have been demolished in recent years, raising the prospect of new discoveries that may shed fresh light on human history.

The city’s Roman past offers an especially exciting line for new discoveries, with a large Roman bath complex already one of Ankara’s top historic landmarks. A prominent element of city life in the Roman Empire, the baths were places where people came not only to clean themselves but also to socialize and spend leisure time. The baths were so central to Roman culture that they were one of the first constructions the empire erected to Romanize the places it conquered.

The archaeological site known as the Roman Baths in Ankara is located on a plateau in Ulus, the city’s old quarter. Emperor Caracalla built the 80-by-130-meter bath structure, made of stone and brick, in the 3rd century to honor the God of Health, Asklepion. The complex had both an outdoor area and an indoor section, which includes a caldarium (hot room), tepidarium (warm room) and frigidarium (cooling room), as well as a kitchen and serving area. The entrance of the site opens out onto a palestra, a court for physical exercises and wrestling. A large number of rectangular and round columns are the hallmark of the site, which today functions as an open-air museum in the heart of the capital.

When the modern Turkish republic was established in 1923, the site was just an area littered with ancient ruins. The bath was discovered in 1937 in excavations led by the Turkish History Institution. Part of the site remains buried under the Cankiri Avenue, one of the capital’s busiest arteries.