Oskar Reinhart collection at the Courtauld Gallery
15 January 2025
Evoking memory and time through architecture
6 February 2025Rescued statuary
Mystery surrounds 2,000-year-old marble statue found dumped in Thessaloniki.
Words: Dan Hayes
T he headless statue of a woman, believed to be more than 2,000 years old, has been found in a rubbish bag near the Greek city of Thessaloniki.
The abandoned 80cm marble artwork was discovered by a passerby in Neoi Epivates, just outside Greece’s second-largest city. He handed it to local authorities who in turn passed it to archaeologists for assessment.
Initial investigations have revealed the piece dates to the Hellenistic era (320-30BC), a period that saw a flourishing of art and culture following the military successes of Alexander the Great.
The artwork will ultimately be given to the local antiquities service for preservation and study. In the meantime, police have conducted an investigation to try and determine how the statue ended up dumped in a bin bag and briefly detained a man for questioning who was later released without charge.
Accidental archaeological discoveries are no rarity in Greece and often occur during construction or infrastructural work.
Last December, for example, workers installing natural gas pipelines near Athens discovered a Roman-era statue of the god Hermes in a location near the Acropolis.
Thessaloniki itself recently unveiled a huge collection of archaeological treasures that were unearthed during the construction of its metro system, which officially opened in November.
Including a marble-paved Roman thoroughfare and tens of thousands of artifacts spanning the Greek, Byzantine and Ottoman periods, these are now on show at the network’s stations.
The city’s metro took nearly 20 years to complete and is the first such system in Greece outside Athens.