After the First World War, Istanbul was under Allied occupation for five years. British, French, and Italian forces ruled the city and take advantage of this exceptional opportunity to engage in archeological excavations in the city as well as in related scholarly activities such as talks, publishing of scholarly works and planning of new schools of archeology based in Istanbul. In this paper, I track these activities and try to uncover the relationship and interaction between these activities and the Ottoman authorities as well as the Ottoman public. I ask why and how occupying armies engaged with archeology, what did they do with their finds as well as the impact of the archeological activities to the city and its peoples. While the political aspects of the Allied occupation of Istanbul are fairly well studied, the cultural aspects, especially archeological aspects are not studied so far. Accordingly, using sources collected from British, French, Italian and Ottoman archives, documents from British and French Archeological Schools in Athens which were engaged with the excavations in the Ottoman capital, and various contemporary scholarly publications and international and Ottoman newspapers this paper contributes to our understanding of the history of archeology and museums and the impact of the occupation to the city. It also contributes to our understanding of life in the occupied city, the dynamics between the occupiers and the occupied, and the uses of the city space by its diverse inhabitants.