Gordion was the capital of Phrygia, and it went onto the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. The site is at Yassıhüyük, above the point where the Sakarya river meets the Porsuk stream, some ninety kilometres south-west of central Ankara and about twenty kilometres north-west of Polatlı. The name comes through Greek from the Phrygian word gordum, meaning city.
What makes the place unusual is not one monument but the length of the record. It begins in the Early Bronze Age, and occupation ran with very few breaks to the fourth century AD, the site was settled again in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it goes on today in the village beside the ruins. That is more than four thousand years in one place, which few sites anywhere can show. The mound itself covers about thirteen and a half hectares, and at its height the settlement spread over roughly a hundred.
Gordion sat where empires met: the Assyrians, Babylonians and Hittites to the east, the Greeks and Romans to the west, on the routes that joined the Aegean and the Mediterranean to the Near East. In the early first millennium BC, above all under Midas, its best-known king, it was the political and cultural centre of the Phrygian kingdom that held much of Asia Minor, and the best-documented Phrygian settlement we have.
For archaeologists the site does two further things. Its destruction layer of about 800 BC is well enough preserved to serve as a fixed point in the chronology of the whole region. And the long tradition of tumulus burial here — the great mounds are the first thing a visitor sees on the plain — records how the Phrygian elite built and buried through the Iron Age.
The first excavations were made in the 1900s by Gustav and Alfred Körte. A second campaign ran from 1950 to 1973 under Rodney Young, supervised by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Ankara as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.4 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (52 mm) and lightest in August (13 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 09:00 - 18:00
Getting there
- Access
- Gordion lies in Yassıhöyük, about 90 kilometres southwest of central Ankara and about 18 kilometres northwest of Polatlı.
