Greek police said on 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.
Organized Crime Unit said he was investigating “after a 32-year-old man went to police to drop off a statue he 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.
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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 the illegal trafficking of antiquities due to the number of items at sites across the country that date back to ancient Greece.
Road and construction works across Greece still regularly reveal new discoveries from this era.
Ancient statues have already been found in waste in Europe. In 2023, a statuette of Venus from Roman times was discovered in a landfill in Rennes, France. The same year, ancient bronze statues were found in a roads in Tuscany, Italy.
In 2013, an 1,800-year-old carved stone head, possibly representing a Roman god, was found in a old landfill in England.