UNESCO Recognition Gives Sardis New Protection as Excavations Continue
A major international designation has arrived for one of archaeology’s most enduring sites. Sardis, the ancient city in western Turkey once at the center of the kingdom of Lydia, has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, bringing new visibility to a place that has been excavated every year since 1958.
The inscription covers Sardis itself and Bin Tepe, the nearby expanse of tumuli, or man-made burial mounds, associated with the city. Together, they form a landscape that has long drawn scholars for its historical depth and for the unusually sustained work of the Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis, which has made the site a fixture of field research for more than six decades.
Benjamin Anderson, an associate professor of history of art and visual studies at Cornell, said recent investigations have concentrated on the Sardis acropolis and the adjacent Temple of Artemis. He noted that the project has benefited from an unusually long scholarly lineage. “Many of us know and have been mentored by colleagues of the previous generation of excavators,” Anderson said. “As a result, it’s one of the few long-term archaeological projects in the region that has generated a critical mass of data.”
That depth matters because Sardis is not a single-period ruin. It is a site of accumulated histories, shaped by Lydia’s rise and fall, by the Persian conquest under Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE, and later by Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule. Lydia is also widely credited with the invention of coinage, a legacy that made Sardis synonymous with wealth in the ancient Mediterranean.
For Annetta Alexandridis, associate director of the excavation and associate professor of history of art and classics at Cornell, the site’s complexity is part of its appeal. “These layers are all there, and make it sometimes difficult to excavate, because they are not clearly stratified,” she said. “They interfere with each other, but, in a way, it’s an ongoing history, and that makes it so fascinating for us.”
The UNESCO designation is expected to help with preservation, a need that researchers say is urgent. Tumuli across the Sardis landscape have been damaged by farming and natural erosion, while looters have caused further destruction. Alexandridis said treasure hunters now operate on “an industrial scale,” using explosives and bulldozers to plunder the site.
She added that the listing could bring practical benefits as well as prestige. “As a local, I can say it is very important,” Alexandridis said. “First of all, now it is known worldwide and because of UNESCO, there can maybe be more funding for the excavation, also people, more tourists and more research. People will know the area much better, and there will be more protection.”
For Sardis, UNESCO status is not an ending. It is a new phase in the effort to study, preserve, and interpret a city whose history still lies partly in the ground.
