A sculpture dating to the Hellenistic Greek period has turned up in the most unlikely of settings.
It all started when a 32-year-old Greek man in the city of Thessaloniki stumbled upon a statue wrapped in a plastic bag and resting by some trash bins this past Saturday and brought it to the Thermaikos Crime Investigation and Prosecution Department’s attention.
After an archaeologist from the government department for antiquities examined the statue and found it to be genuine, police officers from the Cultural Heritage Protection Office of the Department for Combating Illicit Trafficking in Persons and Goods are now investigating, as is the Northern Greece Organized Crime Sub-Directorate.
The statue, meanwhile, is headed to a laboratory for further examination. Also lacking arms, it shows a figure wearing robes whose folds are impressively rendered. It stands just 31 inches high, according to the AP.
Courtesy Ministry of Citizen Protection.
The Hellenistic period begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., after leading expansions of his empire from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the Persian Empire and as far as India, exposing Greek artists to many new influences. It lasted until 31 B.C.E. Hellenistic kings patronized the arts extensively, often commissioning public architecture and sculpture. Hellenistic artists both drew on earlier styles and forged innovative styles of their own.
An art market grew as growing numbers of private collectors also commissioned both copies and original works as well as various other luxury goods.
Some of the most renowned works of Greek art come from the period, including the Winged Victory of Samothrace, at the Louvre Museum; the Barberini Faun; the Venus de’ Medici; and the Borghesi Gladiator.
Dramatic artistic finds in Greek soil are not uncommon, since the area is so rich in cultural history. Last April, a team of archaeologists from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki uncovered a well-preserved 2nd- or 3rd-century marble head of the Greek god Apollo during excavations in Philippi, in northwest Greece. In August, construction workers installing underground water pipelines in a town north of Athens uncovered an ancient mosaic of dancing satyrs.
A monumental building with lion sculptures carved from the same marble that was used to build the Parthenon on Athens’s Acropolis is being excavated outside Aigio, a Greek town on the Peloponnese peninsula, as Artnet News reported just last month.
Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, has such a rich archaeological heritage that when the municipality embarked on a metro system, it turned up so many finds that the city ultimately left them on view in situ, turning the transit system into a unique underground museum.
