Aphrodisias: 29th Kenan Erim Annual Lecture

The Friends of Aphrodisias host their annual lecture 2023

March 16, 2023
18.15 (UK time)
Annual membership: £50. All non-members welcome. For a £35 entrance ticket, please apply to the Honorary Secretary, William Chubb.

Art Workers Guild, The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AT

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Thanks to the incredible work of archaeologists over the past three decades, Aphrodisias in western Turkey, is now considered the finest Graeco-Roman site in Asia Minor, second only to Ephesus.

Prof Bert Smith, Director of Excavations at Aphrodisias, looks back on the achievements of 2022, the first fully active season since the pandemic.

‘A full team of students, colleagues, and experts, including stone restorers from Cliveden Conservation, was back at Aphrodisias,’ writes Patricia Daunt, chariman of the Friends of Aphrodisias Trust, in her annual report. It was an extraordinarily successful summer with significant progress on all major projects: the Basilica, Pool of the Place of Palms, Tetrapylon Street, the House of Kybele, and the Sebasteion. Thomas Kaefer and Gerhard Paul were hard at work setting up large columns and architraves, and the Blue Depot was alive with Cliveden conservators working on difficult marble reliefs. Trevor Proudfoot would have been proud.

‘The big new project in the House of Kybele [pictured here] is producing excellent results’. ‘The late antique mansion just inside the northeast City Wall was part of a neighbourhood that includes a warehouse, a street, and a city gate. This season the house was cleared and cleaned, and the whole area was documented in a new state plan. Careful research reconnected the earlier finds in the museum with their contexts in the house. For example, the team was able to reconstitute the newly discovered assemblage of late Roman lamps and ceramic vessels with the exquisite marble statuette group of Kybele and Zeus that was found in front of a large niche in Room 10 in the private northwest section of the house.

The layout, history, and functional components of the house are coming into focus — its marble-tiled reception suite (Rooms 1-3), small private library(?) and fountain courts (Rooms 18-19), and a wide apsidal garden room (14) still for the most part unexcavated. The heyday of the house was the fifth and sixth century when Aphrodisias was a thriving provincial capital.’

The Friends are also planning a seven-day expedition to Aphrodisias in June. For details, click here.