Police in Greece said Wednesday they were investigating how an ancient Greek statue came to be dumped in a black plastic bag near garbage cans in the northern city of Thessaloniki.
The organized crime unit said it was investigating “after a 32-year-old man went to the police to drop off a statue he had apparently found inside a black bag near dustbins.”
According to the first assessment by the archaeology service, the headless statue is from the Hellenistic period (between 323 and 31 BC), said the police statement. Authorities also released a photo of the statue, which measures 32 by 10 inches.
Greek Police
It will be transferred to the crime investigation team in northern Greece for lab tests, then to the antiquities service for evaluation and conservation, the statement added.
Police have long had to contend with the illegal traffic in antiquities because of the number of artefacts in sites across the country that date back to ancient Greece.
Road and construction work across Greece still turns up new finds from that era on a regular basis.
Ancient statues have been found in trash before in Europe. In 2023, a Roman-era statuette of Venus was discovered in a trash dump in Rennes, France. That same year, ancient bronze statues were found in a garbage dump in Tuscany, Italy.
In 2013, a 1,800-year-old carved stone head possibly depicting a Roman god found in an ancient trash dump in England.
