The Ottomans reused classical ruins in new buildings to construct heritage narratives that legitimized their empire as rooted in ancient civilization. They also repurposed ruins for practical reasons because they were conveniently accessible and affordable building materials. The increasing presence of western Europeans during the long nineteenth century transformed Ottoman sites of classical reuse into spaces of imperial conflict. Western Europeans claimed ownership of the sites for themselves as part of ‘western civilization’s heritage,’ and used their ownership claim to justify exploitative exportation of extracted artifacts. The Ottoman city of Bodrum was one such conflict zone, because it was partially built from ruins of a wonder of the ancient world, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. There was intense local resistance to British extraction of artifacts from Bodrum. Yet the accounts of the lead excavator, Charles Thomas Newton, tell a warped, self-satisfied narrative in which British money, gunboats, science, and technology won the conflict. The local Ottoman resistance receives little academic attention, despite the thorough details that Newton included about it in his accounts, even drawing maps of the land he dispossessed from Ottoman Muslims to make way for artifact extraction, with their names. Reading Newton’s accounts between the lines, one can gain insight into the effects of his imperial venture on the local Ottoman population and the actions they took in response. This paper inverts Newton’s books to recover the experiences of the community in Bodrum before, during, and after the conflict. There is extensive evidence of local engagement with classical antiquities as heritage, despite the ‘ignorant oriental’ stereotype propagated by Newton and authors at the time, a stereotype that persists in discussions of heritage in Anatolia today. During the excavations there were diverse reactions among the local community based on how the excavations affected them, from cooperation with excavations in their fields out of a shared curiosity about the ancient past to dead-set resistance from homeowners whom Newton wanted to evict to excavate below their houses. When the British left with the artifacts, they left behind radical, physical ruptures in the space of the Ottoman community. Despite stark power imbalances between the local Ottomans and western European extractors, the locals were active in the conflict over artifact exportation. In centering the story of the Ottomans of Bodrum, this paper engages broader conversations about the Middle East, including colonial extraction, ‘hierarchies’ of knowledge, historical memory, and identity.