Archaeologists at the ancient city of Sardis in western Turkey have recovered a marble statue of a young man that once stood 2.2 metres tall. Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced the find on 4 August 2026.
The sculpture survived because Roman builders reused it. They laid it face down as paving in a colonnaded street, which shielded the face and the fine carving for centuries. It came out of the ground in two large pieces. The feet and several smaller fragments are missing.
Stylistic analysis places the work between 470 and 450 BC, the ministry says. Sardis was then the seat of the western satrapy of the Achaemenid Persian empire, and before that the capital of Lydia. Monumental marble figures from this early period rarely turn up anywhere in the Mediterranean.
What makes this one unusual is the mixture of styles. The upright stance and the long hair follow sixth-century convention. The veined hands and the modelling of the face belong to the fifth. "This is a sculptor who knew about what's going on in Greece and Italy, but chooses to portray the person as his ancestors had been portrayed," Nicholas Cahill, field director of the Sardis Expedition, told The Art Newspaper.
The clothing points the same way. The young man wears a heavy himation over a thin chiton, and beneath that a garment marked with horizontal bands. No comparable statue from Anatolia or mainland Greece shows that combination, according to the ministry. Researchers read it as local Lydian dress. In his right hand he holds a fruit, probably a quince, most likely an offering to a deity.
Cahill says the find matters because so little is known about the Lydians. Sardis is the only major Lydian site, and excavation there has run for more than 70 years without producing a monumental sculpture of this kind. Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy called it one of the rare surviving examples of monumental marble statuary from the period.
Centuries underground left a thick crust of minerals on the marble. Conservators will clean it slowly, because ancient statues were painted and traces of pigment may still survive. Soil from around the find will be examined for paint as well. Once that work is finished, the statue is to go on display at the Manisa Museum.