50 Lira Sagalassos

Sagalassos, a Pisidian city in the Taurus Mountains of southwestern Turkey, became one of the most extensively excavated sites in the ancient world following the launch of a Belgian-led dig in 1990. By 2013, that project had been running for over two decades and produced an almost unbroken stratigraphic record from Hellenistic through Byzantine periods — the coin's release tracks directly with continued international academic attention to the site rather than any political or monetary event.