site.btaHead of Marble Statue of Goddess Tyche Unearthed in Plovdiv, Proclaimed a “Phenomenal Find”

The head of a statue of the goddess Tyche of Philippopolis was unearthed in the Bishop’s Basilica in Plovdiv, the present-day city situated where the ancient Philippopolis once was, archaeologist Lyubomir Merdzhanov reported on Thursday. Merdzhanov, who has led the excavations, described it as “a phenomenal find” and “an extremely rare artifact” which scientists had hoped to come across for a very long time. Tyche appears on coins found earlier in Plovdiv, dated between the end of the 1st century AD the middle of the 3rd century AD.

On top of the head is a corona muralis, a crown representing a city wall. The head (and presumably, the whole statue) was made according to Hellenistic tradition, of high-quality marble, with the irises shaped like hearts. The crown is a stylized representation of a city gate with a turret on each side, as if the goddess carried the city of Philippopolis on her head, Merdzhanov said.

The artifact is associated with an older, virtually unexplored sanctuary under the Bishop’s Basilica. Merdzhanov’s guess is that the rest of the statue is somewhere around. The size of the head suggests that the whole statue was about 2.5 metres tall. The head is to be analyzed, cleaned and put on display in the Plovdiv Museum of Archaeology.

The scientist likened the discovery to the head of a statue of Cybele unearthed in the Black Sea city of Burgas, but noted that the new find is in better condition.

Tyche’s marble head was found on Wednesday by a team which included two consultants, Prof. Ventsislav Dinchev of the National Institute of Archaeology in Sofia and Zheni Tankova, a longtime explorer of the Bishop’s Basilica of Philippopolis. The head lay near the pulpit of the basilica and was probably used as building material for the structure. It is also possible that its position carried a symbolic meaning, Merdzhanov said.

The marble head was unearthed in the presence of representatives of the National Institute of Immovable Cultural Heritage (NIICH) and criminal police from Sofia.

Merdzhanov hopes that an acceptable way is found to lift the mosaics in the Bishop’s Basilica to enable archaeologists to go deep into the older sanctuary beneath and look for the remainder of the statue.

On April 16, after the NIICH was notified about the discovery of a stone head in the Bishop’s Basilica of Philippopolis, experts surveyed the place and found that the mosaics had been tampered with. They asked Merdzhanov to expose what lay there, and Tyche’s marble head was thus unearthed. It transpired that the head had been unearthed before, and then the soil was placed back over it. At the recommendation of a supervisory commission, the head was buried again, and a protocol was issued banning all activities in the basilica. A similar ban was imposed by Plovdiv Mayor Kostadin Dimitrov, but another order by him says the place should be explored.