Guide
The Necropolis Museum exists because of what a building site turned up. In 2005 Antalya Metropolitan Municipality held an architectural competition for the redevelopment of the old East Bus Garage and public market area in the city centre; the winning scheme, by Erkal Mimarlık (Ozan Erkal and Emre Erkal), went to construction in 2008, and the foundation excavation hit ancient graves.
Specialists from the Antalya Museum Directorate identified the ground as the East Necropolis of ancient Attaleia, and rescue excavation began at once. It ran almost without a break to the end of 2010, covering 8,450 square metres, and produced 846 graves, 1,018 inventoried objects, tens of thousands of study finds and the skeletal remains of close to two thousand people. The area was registered as a first-degree archaeological site in February 2011. A further 2,500 square metres, held back as reserve, was excavated in 2020 with the municipality supplying archaeologists, workers and equipment; nineteen more graves brought the total to 865.
What you see is a cemetery in cross-section rather than a display of objects. Most of the burials are chest-type or cut directly into the bedrock, but there are also chamber tombs with a dromos, chamasoria, chamasoria closed with sarcophagus lids, and graves lined with terracotta plaques, together with a large number of cremation vessels still holding their contents.
The dating is the part that changes the city's story. Work on the finds and on old archive records shows the ground was used as a cemetery almost continuously from the end of the 4th century BC. Attaleia is generally taken to have been founded in the mid-2nd century BC by Attalos II Philadelphos of Pergamon — so material from the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC, found here, is evidence that the site was settled before the Pergamene king arrived.
