This paper discusses the reception of antiquities by ordinary Ottoman Greek men and women in late 19th and early 20th-century Ottoman Anatolia. At a time of growing interest in the history of archaeology, including in the Ottoman Empire, it aims to complement the picture that we have managed to recreate so far - one that focuses on state actors and elites, such as governments, museums, archaeological missions, learned societies and exploration societies – by shifting the attention to those whose views have largely been neglected, the ordinary people. The analysis is based on the concept of “indigenous archaeologies” as described by archaeologist and Brown University professor Yannis Hamilakis, i.e. “local, vernacular discourses and practices involving things from another time” (2011). It is true that capturing the voice of ordinary men and women from the past is usually hard, given a dearth of primary sources. Yet, in our case, the oral history archive at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, which was put together in Greece between the 1930s and 1970s, provides access to thousands of ordinary people’s testimonies, including on antiquities, from across late Ottoman Anatolia. Through a multitude of unheard-of before incidents, attitudes, beliefs and (mis)understandings on the material remains of the past, and unique accounts on these people’s relations with their Muslim neighbours, the Ottoman authorities, and, on occasion, foreigners on archaeological matters that this archive brings to us, we shall be able to critically reconstruct the archaeological world of ordinary Ottoman Greeks, and significantly enrich our understanding of the history of (Ottoman) archaeology. As will be shown, in these people’s archaeological world, time and the past is conceptualised in the modern linear way, as well as in pre-modern atemporal ways. Engagements with antiquities speak of protection but also of harm and destruction. We come across instances of illicit traffic in finds at the same time that finds are consciously preserved on site. Significantly, antiquities may be endowed with talismanic value, which transcends the boundaries of Christianity and may attract the Muslim neighbours of our subjects. This paper, in other words, aims to critically analyse and organise the multitude of experiences that ordinary people could have with antiquities by stressing that reducing them to one type of engagement would be misleading. Even if ordinary Ottoman Greeks did not overall partake in elite understandings of antiquities, their reception of the past is consequential for understanding the history of (Ottoman) archaeology.