From Adana to Vancouver, on the trail of coins

From Adana to Cilicia

Bekircan Tahberer studied German Language and Literature at Çukurova University's Faculty of Education (1980–1984). That training in language became the common thread of everything that followed: reading the legends on ancient coins, working with German and English sources, translating, and eventually writing his own language books.

His real passion was the ancient coinage of the land he lived on. The issues of Cilician cities such as Adana, Tarsos, Mallos, Soloi and Aigeai — turreted heads of Tyche, swimming river gods, the serpent staff of Asklepios — were not merely collected but read as historical documents. From 1999 he published articles in Numismatics International, The Celator and Panorama Numismatico; in 2001 the Adana Culture and Art Association published his book “Adana in Light of its Ancient Coinage”.

Museum, excavation and music archaeology

He chaired the Friends of the Museum Society of the Adana Archaeology Museum (2002–2004) and curated and photographed the museum's Coinage Photography Exhibition in 2002. He published the coins of the Yüceören necropolis unearthed during the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline salvage excavations (Gazi University, 2006), worked on finds from Yumuktepe (Mersin) and Aslantaş (Malatya), and produced countless archaeological translations for the Adana Museum, the Archaeology Department of Çukurova University, the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations and the Mersin Museum.

Between 1996 and 2005 he carried out music-archaeology research in the museums of Adana, Mersin, Tarsus, Malatya, Van, Adıyaman and Karaman and at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, contributing — on a 2001 German Archaeological Institute library research scholarship — to Dr. Werner Bachmann's Encyclopaedia of the Music History of Anatolia.

History of medicine and Asklepios

From 2003 to 2005 he completed a master's degree in the History of Medicine and Deontology at Çukurova University's Institute of Medical Sciences. His thesis, “Asklepios on Ancient Cilician Coins”, supervised by Professor İlter Uzel, brought coin iconography and medical history to the same table; it appeared as an article in Belleten (2005). In the same years he taught the history of medicine in the Classical period, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Hittite Anatolia at the university's History of Medicine department, and spoke at the 3rd National Congress of Medical Ethics (Bursa, 2003) on how Roman cultural values are reflected on coins.

Vancouver: lectures, talks, books

He has lived in Vancouver since 2006. As an adjunct lecturer at Langara College he taught Roman coinage, Greek religion from coins, ancient coin hoards and the coinage of Alexander the Great (2007–2012); he gave the “History from Ancient Coins” series at the Simon Fraser University Seniors Program and a UBC Continuing Studies series reading medicine, music, mythology, architecture and art from coins. He has been a regular speaker at the Vancouver Ancient Coin Club, the Vancouver Numismatic Society, the North Shore Numismatic Society and the Pacific Ancient Numismatists in Seattle, and lectured on “Rethinking the Historical Divide: Relations of Turks and Greeks” at Western Washington University (2006) and the Turkish-Canadian Society (2008).

The Turkish Canadian Society gave him its 2007 Community Service Award for the seminars on history from ancient coins; his short story “A Journey Back Home” received an honorary mention from the Voice of Turkey Radio in 2006.

His books include the two-volume SNG Tahberer – Cilicia, cataloguing some 1,500 coins of the Cilician mints; the Turkish manual “Antik Kilikia Sikkeleri”; the catalogue of the David and Rachel Herman Collection of Byzantine Coins (2020), documenting more than 1,800 coins donated to the UBC Museum of Anthropology; the four-volume “We Are Learning Turkish · Türkçe Öğreniyoruz” (2015); the memoir “Vancouver Öyküleri”; and the story “Defineci” (Treasure Hunter).

Today

He works as a certified translator and interpreter between Turkish and English, and since 2021 has been publishing a very large hoard find piece by piece in the “Eastern Mediterranean Hoard” series — Tarsos, Mallos, Soloi, Holmoi–Ura–Kelenderis, Side and Aspendos. In his Turkish-language “Sikkeloji” seminar series (2021) he continues to teach ancient numismatics in his own language and to propose Turkish terms for the discipline. A collaboration with Semsera that began in 2026 brought “We Are Learning Turkish” to SemsLanguage free of charge; this open archive is part of the same collaboration.

And at home, the quiet partner in all of it: his cat, Kiwi.