Archaeologists in Bulgaria made an surprising discovery in an historic Roman sewer final week: A well-preserved marble statue, taller than a person.
“We found it by accident,” mentioned Lyudmil Vagalinski, the scientific director of the excavation. “It was amazing. A whole statue appeared in front of us.”
The discovery might illuminate how individuals in the realm, modern-day Bulgaria, fought to protect their faith as Christianity swept throughout the traditional world. The sewer might have been a hiding place utilized by pagans making an attempt to guard the imposing statue from Christian zealots, who generally destroyed the heads of pagan deities.
They appear to have succeeded: Researchers haven’t but unearthed the complete statue, however the face and head present no indicators of destruction.
“It’s a miracle that it survived,” Dr. Vagalinski mentioned.
He and his colleagues have been engaged on a routine dig close to the village of Rupite, near Bulgaria’s southwestern border with Greece, in the blistering summer time warmth final week once they noticed marble in the soil.
They tried to maintain their pleasure in test, Dr. Vagalinski mentioned, as a marble foot emerged. Then, they noticed cautious carvings on the toenails. Legs sprouted upward. A torso adopted. Finally, a head.
“It was just waiting for us,” he mentioned. Almost as if the statue had discovered them, not the opposite means round.
This wouldn’t be the primary historic statue to emerge from an unsavory trench: Construction employees in Rome also found a marble figure in a sewer system final yr.
The Bulgarian statue — which Dr. Vagalinski thinks might depict the god Hermes — might have been buried in the late fourth century. He thinks it was positioned in the sewer just a few years after 380 A.D., the yr Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official faith of the Roman Empire.
The pagans in the traditional metropolis the place the statue was discovered, then known as Heraclea Sintica, might have needed to guard their treasures from Christian defacement.
“They tried to secretly preserve their memory of these deities,” Dr. Vagalinski mentioned.
He additionally thinks that the statue might have been buried a while after 388 A.D., when a serious earthquake hit the realm and devastated town. It seems to have destroyed infrastructure to such an extent that the sewers have been not purposeful, he mentioned.
But although the sewer had been decommissioned following the quake, Dr. Vagalinski added, it remained sturdy, and have become one thing of a burial floor for pagan historical past.
“Although we might not think a sewer is the right place, at least it would be unharmed,” mentioned the Rev. Professor Martin Henig, an knowledgeable on Roman artwork at Oxford University who was not related to the dig. “Nobody was going to touch the sewer,” he added.
The statue is lacking a part of its proper arm, which nearly seems to be prefer it was amputated, Dr. Vagalinski mentioned. The left hand could also be broken, too. But in any other case, the statue appears principally intact.
“It is rare and exciting to find an almost perfectly intact statue, and especially one of such apparently high quality,” Elizabeth Marlowe, the director of the museum research program at Colgate University, who was not concerned in the dig, wrote in an electronic mail.
The statue’s geographic location can also provide insights to researchers. Many such well-preserved statues have been looted, Dr. Marlowe wrote, and “surface seemingly out of thin air in dealers’ shops in Switzerland or New York.”
This can imply that the finds — though exceptional — are sometimes stripped of clues about their origins. (Smugglers work onerous to erase these particulars to hinder cultural officers who might attempt to get artifacts again to the place they have been discovered.)
“If this surfaced on the art market, we would never in a million years have guessed that it came from a small town in the Bulgarian hinterland,” Dr. Marlowe wrote. “We would have guessed that it came from a wealthy city or private estate in Italy.”
Such a powerful marble statue — which she mentioned was a uncommon discover in southwest Bulgaria — could possibly be helpful to understanding Heraclea Sintica. Dr. Marlowe mentioned town was not a widely known Roman website. “This has the potential to greatly enrich our understanding of the local culture of this region,” she wrote.
For now, Dr. Vagalinski and his crew are centered on fastidiously extracting the statue. Once it’s absolutely excavated, which he hopes will occur this week, he and different researchers will work up to now and analyze the piece — earlier than readying it for show in the native historical past museum.
“It’s like a sensation,” he mentioned. “Such huge statues are very rarely found.”
Boryana Dzhambazova contributed reporting.