Skip to main content
Radar Türkiye
Discover events in the app
Open
Radar Türkiye

The Journey of the Karun Treasures

On the road from Uşak to İzmir, about twenty-five kilometres west of the city, lies a settlement called Güre.

Radar TürkiyeRadar Türkiye4 Kasım 2026
No ratings yet

Sign in to like and rate

The Journey of the Karun Treasures

On the road from Uşak to İzmir, about twenty-five kilometres west of the city, lies a settlement called Güre. The rounded hills at the edge of the narrow plain watered by the Gediz River look like ordinary hills at first glance. They are in fact burial mounds, tumuli, from the Lydian period, and one of the most talked-about antiquities smuggling stories of the twentieth century began here. The finds known as the Karun Treasures were taken out of these hills, travelled as far as the storerooms of a museum across the ocean, and came back after a long legal struggle. This article tells the story of that journey and of how the treasures can be seen in Uşak today.

The burial mounds of the Güre plain

According to Uşak Municipality, near the plain north of Güre there are tumuli of the Lydian and Greco-Persian periods, dated to the sixth century BC. A tumulus is an artificial hill made by heaping earth over a stone burial chamber in which the dead person was laid. In the chamber the deceased was placed on a couch called a kline, with valuable belongings left alongside. Lydia is known as the state where coins were first struck and used, and Uşak, in the words of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, lies within its former borders. The hills known by names such as Toptepe, İkiztepe, Aktepe, Basmacı and Harta were the noble tombs of this wealthy world.

The years of illegal digging

The municipality reports that the looting began in 1965 with the illegal excavation of the Toptepe Tumulus. According to the later statements of those who dug it, when they entered the burial chamber there was a silver jug on the floor and a large number of marble alabastra. A beam that had fallen from the ceiling had damaged the room, but most of the treasure was found on the kline where the body had been laid. Among the finds were a silver jug with a handle in human form, a ladle with sphinxes and a gold-headed handle, a gold rattle that rings when shaken, hollow gold earrings, a necklace with acorn pendants and a pair of blue glass bracelets with lion-head ends. The municipality's list also includes smaller earrings with pins, a geometric necklace of agate and coloured stones, a tassel-shaped gold neck ornament with stone beads at its ends, and a gold brooch with pendants in the shape of a winged horse. The Toptepe finds were sold through intermediaries to organised smugglers.

A year later, in 1966, it was İkiztepe's turn. On the western slope of this tumulus, known locally as İkizce, a villager found a neatly cut marble block. Smugglers who knew about the earlier robbery started digging here and, unable to enter the burial chamber, blew its ceiling open with gunpowder. Someone who felt cheated in the sharing reported the matter to the gendarmerie. According to the municipality some objects were recovered and some of the smugglers were sentenced, but one man who escaped with the objects in his hands passed them on to the same buyer who had bought the Toptepe finds. After things had calmed down, İkiztepe was dug again and the second burial chamber was reached, but this chamber was empty. Thinking the objects might be hidden inside the kline, the smugglers smashed it; according to the municipality, a piece of this kline can still be seen today used as a building stone in the wall of a village house. In the same years the burial chamber of the Aktepe Tumulus was found by villagers out hunting; its wall paintings in red, blue, black and green and the decorated legs of its kline were broken up with chisels and sent to İzmir to be sold. The back wall of the chamber was broken up after fake paintings had been made on it, and sold to antique dealers.

Part of this loss can never be recovered. When a wall painting is torn from a burial chamber, what disappears is not only an object but also the knowledge of where it stood, beside what and in which arrangement. This is why archaeologists regard illegal digging as the greatest threat to their work.

To a museum across the ocean

An article by archaeologist Mahmut Aydın of Batman University, published in the journal TÜBA-AR, summarises the next steps. The 363 objects illegally excavated from the Güre tumuli between 1965 and 1968 came to be called the Karun Treasure, and all of them were sold through illicit channels to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The existence of the treasure came to light when journalist Özgen Acar saw the objects in an exhibition in 1985. Once the Ministry of Culture and Tourism was alerted, an official request for the return of the objects was made in 1986. When the request was refused, Turkey filed a lawsuit in the United States in 1987.

As Aydın relates, the process ended in 1993 and the Karun Treasure was returned to Turkey. The objects were first displayed at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara and in 1996 were moved to the museum of the city where they had been found, Uşak.

The second journey of the winged seahorse

The rarest piece of the treasure is the gold winged seahorse brooch from Toptepe. This small brooch, associated in ancient mythology with a creature in the form of a winged horse, measures about five centimetres from the wing tip to the end of the central pendant, according to Aydın's measurements. While on display in Uşak, the brooch was replaced with a fake and stolen at the end of 2005. The theft was noticed in 2006, and the brooch was sought by Interpol and the Turkish police. During this time several fake seahorses offered on the market by smugglers were seized, but all of them turned out to be crude copies.

A brooch suspected to be the original was found in the German city of Hagen in October 2012. The real question now was whether it was the brooch stolen from Uşak. Before the theft, only its description, weight, dimensions and a photograph of its front existed; there was no analysis of its chemical composition. Measurements were therefore made in Turkey and in Germany with a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. This device identifies the elements in a metal and their proportions without touching the object or taking a sample.

The results were clear. The gold content of the brooch found in Hagen averaged 96.9 per cent, while the average for the Lydian gold from Toptepe and the surrounding tumuli was 96.8 per cent. The silver figures matched as well, at 2.23 and 2.26 per cent. The composition of the fake brooch in Uşak, on the other hand, matched today's twenty-two and eighteen carat gold; the article states that it was very probably cast by melting down modern gold of different carats. To make the fake convincing, the copyists had removed the stones from the pendants of the original brooch and fitted them to the fake; this is why the pendants of the brooch in Hagen had no stones. Besides the chemical measurements, the article also includes an archaeological assessment. According to the examination by Assoc. Prof. Ertekin Mustafa Doksanaltı of the Department of Archaeology at Selçuk University, the front of the brooch was shaped by hammering a gold sheet placed over a mould; details such as the wing feathers and tail scales were worked by chisel hammering. On the brooch in Hagen there were also traces of wax, which may have been used when a mould was taken from it in Uşak to produce the fake. This archaeometric study proved that the object was the original, and the brooch was brought back to Turkey. The Ministry's description of the museum also stresses that the brooch was found in Germany through the Ministry's efforts and returned to its homeland.

Where to see the treasure today

Uşak Archaeology Museum moved in 2018 from the building it had used for about forty-eight years to its new building near the railway station. Kültür Portalı states that the museum has three floors and that the top floor is devoted to the Lydian period and the Karun Treasures. According to the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, this floor has two sections. In the first, objects from the Basmacı, Toptepe and Aktepe tumuli are arranged in order, and at the very back stands the winged seahorse brooch. The other section presents reconstructions of the İkiztepe and Harta tumuli, Lydian trade, the crafts of the period such as weaver, potter and mould maker, and daily life.

It makes sense to visit the museum in the order of this article. On the first floor, finds from Uşak reaching from the Palaeolithic to the Roman and East Roman periods, and stone works from ancient cities such as Akmonia, Blaundos and Sebaste, show the long past in which the treasure stands. On the mezzanine floor the striking and use of coins are explained through reconstructions, and coins of different periods are displayed together with coin hoards found within the borders of Uşak. In the sculpture section of the same floor stand Roman-period statues of administrators, statesmen and athletes found within the borders of Uşak. After seeing Lydian money on the mezzanine, when you climb to the top floor you understand better what gold and silver meant in the wealth of this land. At the end of your visit, also stop at the ethnography section, which presents Uşak's local costumes, swords and everyday objects; the museum also has an education area for children, a conference hall and a specialist library.

A few tips for your visit

The museum is in the city centre and, according to Kültür Portalı, can be reached by local public transport. Check opening hours, closing days and admission conditions on the Ministry's official museum page before you go. Do not hurry in front of the cases on the treasure floor; the beads of the necklaces, the hollow bodies of the earrings and the sphinxes on the ladle handle can only be made out by looking closely. If you have come to see the seahorse, remember that it is at the very back of the section.

If you take the İzmir road after the museum, you will pass Güre. Do not climb onto the tumuli or disturb the soil; looking out over the plain from the road is enough to understand from which landscape the objects you saw in the museum came. In the end the story of the Karun Treasures is a story of return: from the mound to the museum, from the museum to the far side of the ocean, and from there back to the city where it was born.

Sources

Comments

0/1000

Be the first to comment