Greek police said Wednesday they were investigating how an ancient Greek statue was dumped in a black plastic bag near trash bins in the northern city of Thessaloniki.
The organized crime unit said it was investigating “after a 32-year-old man went to police to drop off a statue he had apparently found in a black bag near the trash cans.”
According to the first evaluation of the archeology service, the headless statue would be from the Hellenistic period (between 323 and 31 BC), specifies the police press release. Officials also released a photo of the statue, which measures 32 inches by 10 inches.
Greek font
It will be transferred to the Northern Greece Criminal Investigation Team for laboratory testing and then to the Antiquities Department for evaluation and conservation, the statement added.
Police have long grappled with illegal antiquities trafficking due to the number of artifacts at sites across the country that date back to ancient Greece.
Road building and construction work throughout Greece regularly reveals new discoveries from this era.
Ancient statues have already been found in waste in Europe. In 2023, a statuette of Venus from the Roman era was discovered in a landfill in Rennes, France. The same year, ancient bronze statues were discovered in a landfill in Tuscany, Italy.
In 2013, an 1,800-year-old carved stone head possibly representing a Roman god was found in an old landfill in England.
