For centuries a single Doric column has stood on the high ground above the old harbour of Apollonia. It stands outside the city proper, in a sanctuary on the edge of town, and it holds up nothing at all. Its temple fell long ago. What that temple looked like, how its inner chamber met its ring of columns, whether an older shrine lies beneath it: none of this is yet known. The column has had to stand in for the whole building.

This autumn the ground around it gave up a little more. As Leman Altuntaş reported for Arkeonews, an international team worked at Shtyllas through September and the first half of October 2026, digging inside the temple and surveying the land around it. The project was directed by Dr. Lavdosh Jaupaj of Albania’s Institute of Archaeology and Professor Stephan G. Schmid of Humboldt University of Berlin. They found coins struck at Apollonia’s own mint, pieces of sculpture, and roofing brought across the Ionian Sea from Greece. The Albanian broadcaster ABC News reported that the season consisted of two test trenches.

A roof that came by sea

The roof is the most striking find. According to the Institute of Archaeology, the preliminary evidence suggests the builders laid marble roof tiles from the island of Paros alongside tiles imported from Corinth. The roof is dated to the second half of the fifth century BC, in the Classical period. Parian marble was prized all over the Greek world. Corinth was a centre of architectural experiment and of terracotta roofing.

A roof is the part of a temple no worshipper ever touches. Here it was cut on one island, fired in another city, loaded onto ships and hauled up a slope on the far shore of the sea. Someone paid for all of that so that a building on the eastern Adriatic would be crowned like the temples of the Greek homeland. That is a reading, not a finding, but the tiles are hard to read any other way.

The team also found roofing that seems to be local, and it probably belongs to later phases of the building, when it was repaired or altered. The founders sent across the sea for marble. The people who came after them kept the rain out with whatever was close at hand.

The cow and her calf

Apollonia was founded by settlers from Corinth and Corcyra, and it grew into a busy city and trading port before Rome drew it in. In the fourth century BC it started minting its own money. The first silver staters were modelled on Corinth’s coins, and later issues followed the coinage of Corcyra. The city’s best-known emblem was a cow suckling her calf, first on staters and later on drachms, which Apollonia struck in large numbers in the Hellenistic period. The coins travelled well beyond the coast and turned up in communities across the Balkans.

One bronze coin photographed at Shtyllas carries Greek letters around an object that looks like the sacred obelisk of Apollo Agyieus, set inside a laurel wreath. Similar designs are known on Apollonian bronze coins, some of them Hellenistic. But the excavators have not yet published a firm identification or date for this coin, and they have not published where exactly the coins were found or how old those layers are.

So for now the coin has no name. It only shows that people came to this sanctuary and left money behind.

A column at risk

The column is in danger. Humboldt University’s project description says it is at risk of collapse, and calls it the only standing example of Doric architecture in Albania and the eastern Adriatic. That is why the project lists restoration first and building research and archaeological reassessment after it. The project was scheduled to run from September 2021 to August 2025, and this season’s digging carries the work on.

Before this team came an earlier Albanian-German expedition led by Professor Bashkim Lahi and the archaeologist Grigor Doehner. Shqiptarja.com reported that the expedition uncovered the temple’s foundations and found them well preserved. According to the same outlet, the temple was declared a cultural monument in 1971, and only one of its twelve columns still stands.

The 2026 team brought together researchers from Albania, Germany and Romania, with students from several European universities taking part through the Erasmus programme. Their season came a month after six Roman mosaics were uncovered at another site in southern Albania.

Altar, ramp, and the long afterlife

One trench went in around the altar. It shed new light on how the sanctuary was arranged and on the successive phases in which it was used and destroyed. The second trench opened the entrance and the ramp that once led into the building. More architectural remains were recorded there, but they do not yet show how this part of the temple was laid out. The Institute has said that firm conclusions will need more research.

The trenches also produced a great deal of pottery from the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods, along with fragments of ancient sculpture. The finds follow the site’s story long past its gods. ABC News reported that the team is studying how the temple was used and destroyed from antiquity into the Ottoman period. Empires came and went over the harbour, and each one left a little debris in the same hilltop soil.

Outside the temple, specialists ran geophysical and geoelectrical surveys to look for buried structures without disturbing them. The readings are still being processed.