A Man Found a Mysterious Statue in a Trash Bag on the Street. It Turned Out to Be a 2,000-Year Old Greek Artifact

Earlier this month, a 32-year-old Greek man brought something remarkable to his local police station: a statue of a woman draped in flowing cloth, missing its arms and head. He’d found it encased in a black plastic bag next to garbage cans on the street.

Authorities called in experts to examine the piece. According to a statement from the Greek police, they determined that the statue dates back to Greece’s Hellenistic period—which lasted from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. until around 31 B.C.E.

“This is not the first time” a civilian has handed over a statue to police, as Vasilis Tempelis, a culture ministry spokesperson, tells the New York Times’ Christine Hauser. Plans to investigate the circumstances and analyze the statue are already in motion.

Local police have turned over the statue to investigators from Greece’s Cultural Heritage Protection Office. The piece will be sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis before making its way to the local antiquities authority, as the Associated Press’ Costas Kantouris reports. Police have questioned one man about the discarded statue and released him without charge.

The artifact was found in Neoi Epivates, a suburb of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, per the AP. It’s just over 31 inches tall—about the length of a baseball bat. As Bert Smith, a classical archaeologist at Oxford University, tells the Times, the marble statue was probably made for religious purposes.

“The small size is typical for such marble votives set up to divinities in sanctuaries or temples,” he says. In ancient Greece, “people prayed to divinities and made dedications to them in thanks for their favor.”

Greece’s three-century-long Hellenistic era was marked by cultural expansion and exchange. Alexander the Great died without a successor, leaving the vast empire he’d conquered to be divided into three large kingdoms, which secured Greek influence throughout the Middle East and into South Asia. Greece became more cosmopolitan, and its philosophy and art scenes flourished.

Unlike the “detached idealism” found in the sculptures of Greece’s Classical period—during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.—Hellenistic sculptures “reflected a new awareness of personality and introspection by showing realism and human emotion,” wrote art historian Summer Trentin and classicist Debby Sneed in 2018. Hellenistic sculptors paid special attention to draped fabric, like the dress worn in the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the female body, as seen in Aphrodite of Knidos.

As Estelle Strazdins, a classicist at the Australian National University, tells the Washington Post’s Rachel Pannett, the recently discovered statue’s loose, draping clothing—as well as its marble composition—suggest the piece depicts a goddess. Contemporary sculptures of earthly Greek women were usually made from terra-cotta and depicted them clothed in tight cloaks.

Strazdins also thinks the statue was dedicated in a temple. However, its small size suggests it wasn’t “the main statue in the sanctuary,” she says. “It might be a gift that someone has given to the god either to thank them for something or in the hopes of getting some kind of grant.”

The statue’s garb appears to be a peplos, a one-piece wool garment, per the Times. Still, the statue’s missing limbs make discerning its identity difficult. As Smith tells the publication, “The arms might tell us what the figure was doing and what attributes it may have carried.”

This more than 2,000-year-old artifact is one of thousands found in and around Thessaloniki in recent years. The city’s two-decade-long construction of a new subway system—which opened last month—unearthed over 300,000 archaeological finds illustrating Greece’s ancient history.