A prominent showcase entitled "New entries / New approaches" welcomes visitors to the museum's reception area.
It introduces them to some of our collection's most interesting new and old objects; we present items recently acquired or storeroom objects after a new approach, such as a restoration process, a new interpretation or new scientific data.
The fascinating modern biography of a table support of Roman Times
A table support complete for the first time 80 years later!
A little Eros is depicted, referring to depictions of Hercules as he stands upright with his legs slightly bent and urinates while embracing a club, one of the hero's symbols, with his left hand. The figure stands on a four-sided base and rests with his back on a small column with a lathe on the upper surface to adjust the horizontal part of the table. It is dated in to the 3rd century AD.
The marble table support consists of two parts welded at the neck level, separately discovered, in different periods at Nea Potidaia in Chalkidiki.
The body of the sculpture, as revealed by intensive research in the Historical Archive of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, was found in October 1932 on the southeastern side of the village by the director of the local Primary School and curator of antiquities of Nea Potidaia Konstantinos Melas who included it in the small collection of antiquities being kept in the school. On the night of 16 May 1933, however, antiquities thieves, taking advantage of the storm and the fact that the entire Chalkidiki gendarmerie was busy searching for an escapee from the Kassandra prison, broke a window of the school and stole the sculpture. The fate of the "headless statue of a child", as mentioned in documents of the time, was unknown until September 5, 1933 when it was rediscovered, buried in the sand, by two local women while doing their laundry on the seashore.
Two antique dealers moving in the area in search of antiquities were suspected of the theft, but their lengthy interrogation did not reveal any evidence of guilt. In 1934, the archaeologist Charalambos Makaronas transferred the sculpture, along with the other objects of the Nea Potidaia’s school collection, to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which was then housed in the Yeni Cami (New Mosque). The sculpture was included in the museum's collection under the index number MTh 1233.
At the beginning of 1940, the then director of the Primary School and curator of antiquities of Nea Potidaia, Aikaterini Georgiadou, informed the Ephorate of Antiquities in Thessaloniki that workers employed in road construction at the south-eastern exit of the village found a marble head with a conjoined column. No one, however, associated this find with the headless table support already on display in the Thessaloniki museum. The head was later added to the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros under the index number MP 457.
The identification of the two aforementioned finds as parts of the same sculpture was made in 2022 by Dimitra Aktseli, archaeologist of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalkidiki and Mount Athos. Following Mrs Aktseli’s scientific conclusion, the Ephorate requested the long-term loan of the part belonging to the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, in order to include the table support completed in the re-exhibition program of the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros.
In return, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chalkidiki and Mount Athos offered four vases and a clay figurine to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which included them in its permanent exhibition “In Macedonia, from the 7th c. B.C. until the Late Antiquity”.
After April 2024, the table support will be embodied in the new permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum of Polygyros.
