It is a fragment of a free-blown vessel of closed shape (ΜΘ 183).

On its bottom is attached a glass figurine of a hare, 8 cm tall. The animal has a cylindrical hollow body, and a globular head. Separate pieces of tooled glass attached to the body and the head form the ears, the mouth and the legs. The eyes are made of blue glass and a tiny red thread is added to each pupil. It appears that after the original breaking of the vessel the base was trimmed and transformed to a toy or an ornament that, probably, later has been put into a child’s grave. The vessel is made of colourless greenish glass, while the hare is basically of milky glass with some blue and red touches.

It is among the earliest acquisitions of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki; it was handed in by a villager who, somewhere around 1913, found it in an ancient grave at Dion, Pieria.

The hare vessel belongs to the small group of so-called flask-in-a-flask: a tiny vessel is placed at the inside of a larger vessel (usually a jug or an amphora). The exhibit from Dion is one among the flask-in-a-flask vessels, containing an animal figurine instead of a vessel.

Despite the fact that many samples have been unearthed in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, the production of this type of vessels is supposed to be of Syro-Palestinian origin. The here considered vessel appears to share several features with similar glass vessels of the Rhine-region, which seems to be its production area.

Date: 3rd  - early 4th c. A.D.

You can see the exhibit at the permanent exhibition “Macedonia from the 7th century BC until the Late Antiquity”, Showcase 12.