The scientific excavations in the ancient city of Pergamon, today in western Turkey, were initiated by Carl Humann (1839-1896) a German engineer who was employed as a surveyor to scout potential railway routes throughout the Ottoman Empire. A considerable amount of fragments from the ancient city Pergamon were shipped to Germany, a special museum was built in 1899 on Berlin’s Museumsinsel and Humann became known as the “discoverer” of the Pergamon Altar (180–160 BC), which is considered today as the “main attraction” of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. From 2013 onwards, the Turkish government has demanded the restitution of several artefacts that are acquired by the West European countries during the late Ottoman times, including the Pergamon Altar. While the Turkish Ministry of Culture declared the will to exhibit “the power to call on the wide landscape of heritage” through the restituted artefacts in the recently restored Museum of Anatolian Civilizations (Ankara), the Municipality of Izmir has been pushing for the Pergamon Altar coming back to its “original place”, to the Pergamon Museum in Bergama. While the competition continues about the “next” place of the Pergamon Altar, Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin has refused to return fragments from Pergamon excavation by mobilizing a clear-cut dichotomy between a “West” that is capable to preserve and be in charge of the common good, and “an East” that possess a ‘gold mine’ (of cultural assets) but not the capabilities to operationalize it in service of the world. Against the backdrop of the debates on restitution and decolonializing the museums, this presentation focuses on the regimes of remembrance of the Ottoman excavations that are forged by the three museums involved in the restitution debate of the Pergamon Altar. Firstly, it examines the legal basis of “moving” archeological remains from the Ottoman Empire to Imperial Germany. Secondly, it co-reads the ways in which the legal frameworks of the excavations conducted in the Ottoman lands have been narrated in the Pergamon Museum in Bergama, the Museum of Anatolian Civilisation in Ankara and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Taking museums as sites of knowledge production, it presents multiple constructions of legality of “moving” and restituting archeological objects. It argues that orientalism and civilizational discourses are not matters of the past, are constantly reiterated in contemporary knowledge production on heritage, especially when it comes to notions of legitimate possession.