A colossal marble statue of a young man holding out a quince has surfaced during excavations at ancient Sardis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Manisa's Salihli district, Turkey. The figure stands 2.2 metres tall, upright and remarkably intact, and has been dated to between 470 and 450 BC — placing it in the early Classical period, roughly 2,500 years ago (Archaeology Wiki).

Turkey's Minister of Culture announced the find (Heritage Daily). It came to light through ongoing archaeological work at Sardis, which was the capital of the Lydian Empire and later a major city under Persian, Hellenistic and Roman rule. The site has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list, recognising its continuous occupation across more than two and a half millennia.

The statue depicts a young man in a standing pose, his arm extended to offer a quince — a fruit associated in ancient Greek and Near Eastern cultures with fertility, love and ritual offering. The carving is in white marble, and the figure's proportions and serene expression are consistent with the early Classical style that flourished in the Greek world during the fifth century BC (La Brújula Verde).

What makes the discovery notable is the combination of scale, subject and location. Colossal freestanding marble figures from this period are rare, particularly outside the major Greek sanctuaries and city-states. Sardis, deep in the Lydian interior of what is now western Turkey, was a crossroads between the Greek world and the Near East, and finds of this calibre there add a physical piece to the puzzle of how sculptural traditions moved and adapted across cultural boundaries.

The early Classical period — roughly 480 to 450 BC — falls just after the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, which had absorbed Lydia into its holdings in the mid-sixth century BC. Sculpture from this era began moving away from the rigid, frontal poses of the earlier Archaic style toward more naturalistic anatomy and contrapposto, the weight-shift stance that gives the body a sense of lived movement.

No further details about conservation plans or museum placement have been announced. Excavations at Sardis, which have run in various campaigns since the mid-nineteenth century, continue.