British Institute at Ankara Research Reports 2007 11 Historical-archaeological investigation of Akkerman fortress, Ukraine 2007 Caroline Finkel, Svitlana Bilyayeva, Richard Haddlesey, James Mathieu and Victor Ostapchuk c/o British Institute at Ankara and Universities of Winchester and Toronto Our study of the Ottoman period in the life of the northern Black Sea fortress of Akkerman on the Dnister estuary was given an extra fillip this season by the wide interest in varied aspects of Ottoman borderlands evidenced at the British Academy-sponsored workshop ‘The Frontiers of the Ottoman World’, held in London in February 2007 and organised by the British Institute at Ankara. Our spirits were somewhat dented, however, when we arrived on site to see the effects of a fire deliberately set by a film crew on one of the bastions (no. 30 on the plan below) that caused its internal wooden beams to smoulder for weeks and threatens permanent damage to this feature. Although Akkerman was listed as an endangered site in 2004 by the World Monuments Fund, the situation has not visibly improved, and its value as an unregulated tourist resource continues to trump all other considerations. As in 2006, Svitlana Bilyayeva led the excavation of the ‘barbican’ in the port yard on the shore of the Dnister, working there with her team for almost 12 weeks and paying short visits to the site subsequently to oversee conservation work undertaken by Oleksandr Bilyayev. Ottoman historians Caroline Finkel and Victor Ostapchuk spent nearly three weeks at Akkerman, assessing how information regarding repair and construction of the fortress in the written record can be utilised to illuminate its building chronology and function. They were assisted in this by fortress specialist Jim Mathieu. This season, for the first Plan of Akkerman fortress showing locations identified from Ottoman documents (italics indicate tentative identities). A = citadel, B = garrison yard, C = civil yard, D = port yard. 1-30 = towers/gates (based on 1955 survey, State Institute for City Planning [DIPROMIST], Odessa branch [Şlapac 2001: 90]) Anatolian Archaeology 13 (2007), 11-14