Some 12,000 years ago, on a limestone ridge outside today's Şanlıurfa, hunter-gatherers raised the monumental pillars of Göbeklitepe, the world's oldest known monumental temple complex. Not long after, on the plains stretching toward Harran, humans began domesticating wheat and animals, setting off the Neolithic Revolution. It is fitting, then, that this year's Teknofest, held in Şanlıurfa, in southeastern Türkiye, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4, showcased not only Türkiye's drones and defense systems but also a new frontier: high-tech agriculture and livestock. The land that gave humanity its first harvest is now being asked to imagine its next one.
More than 1 million people visited Teknofest Southeast over five days. These were not only engineers, students and industry insiders, but also families from surrounding villages and cities, schoolchildren, retirees, farmers and young people who may never have set foot in a technology fair before. For a region long described in terms of what it lacked – investment, security, opportunity – the crowds told a different story. The southeast came, and it came curious.
Since its launch in 2018, Teknofest has become more than an aviation and technology festival. It is one of the most effective instruments of public mobilization Türkiye has built in the past decade. Its genius lies in a simple idea: that technology should not be the preserve of a narrow elite, but a national aspiration shared by a child in Şanlıurfa as much as by a student in Bilkent or Boğaziçi Universities. It is also a statement against technofeudalism and the attempted monopolization of science and technology by the forces of colonialism. Each regional edition plants a seed, in the hope that some of those children will one day stand on the other side of the exhibition stands.
Defense technology, as always, drew the largest crowds. Türkiye's defense industry has transformed from a dependent buyer into an exporter whose products have reshaped battlefields and diplomatic calculations alike. For many visitors, seeing these systems up close is a source of pride, and a lesson in what sustained investment, domestic talent and political will can achieve in a single generation.
Yet for me, the most telling addition this year was not on the runway. The debut of the Agricultural Technologies Cluster Foundation (TÜME), focused on high-tech agriculture and livestock, signals a broadening of the Teknofest vision. If defense was the first proof of concept for Türkiye's technological ambitions, food may well be the next.
Climate change, water scarcity, supply chain shocks and the war in Ukraine have reminded every government that food security is national security. Türkiye is an agricultural powerhouse, but its farming sector still struggles with fragmented landholdings, an aging rural workforce and inefficient irrigation. Precision agriculture, smart irrigation, livestock genetics and agricultural drones are no longer futuristic concepts; they will determine which countries feed themselves and which depend on others to do so.
Perhaps Şanlıurfa was the natural place to make this case. The Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) turned the Harran Plain into one of Türkiye's most productive agricultural regions, bringing Euphrates water to land that had been parched for centuries. But water alone is not enough. The next leap depends on how efficiently that water is used, how well farmers are trained, and whether young people see agriculture not as a fate to escape but as a sector worth entering. By placing agriculture under the same bright lights as fighter drones, Teknofest sends a powerful message: farming is high-tech, too. And, perhaps more importantly for young people, farming is cool, too.
Holding such an event in the southeast at this particular moment also carries a broader political meaning. The region bears the scars of decades of terrorism, the spillover of the Syrian civil war, the burden of hosting millions of refugees and the devastation of the February 2023 earthquakes. As Türkiye pursues its "terror-free Türkiye" vision, the question is what will fill the space that violence once occupied. The answer cannot be only security. It must be opportunity: jobs, education, investment and a sense that the future is being built here, not elsewhere.
Teknofest, at its best, offers exactly that. It tells a young person in Siverek or Viranşehir that the country's most ambitious projects are open doors, not distant spectacles. It tells investors that the southeast is not a periphery but a frontier. And it tells the world that Türkiye's technological rise is not confined to a few industrial hubs in the west.
Göbeklitepe reminds us that this land has reinvented itself before. Twelve millennia later, it may be ready to do so again.
