Las Incantadas of Salonica (Greek: Μαγεμένες της Θεσσαλονίκης or Λας Ινκαντάδας) is a group of Roman sculptures from a portico dating to the second century AD that once adorned the Roman Forum of Thessalonica in northern Greece, and were considered to be among the most impressive and prestigious monuments of the city. Based on descriptions by travellers, it consisted of five Corinthian columns with four of them having bilateral sculptures on each pillar above. The sculptures were removed in 1864 by French paleologist Emmanuel Miller and placed in the Louvre museum in France, while the rest of the building collapsed and was destroyed. A fragment from a lost, fifth sculpture was discovered in the city in the late twentieth century.
Greece is seeking the return of the sculptures, although with little success.
Name
During the Ottoman period the monument was known by several bynames. In Greek they were called Magemenes ("enchanted ones"), while in Judaeo-Spanish spoken by the Sephardic community it was Las Incantadas, while the Turks called it Sureth Maleh (Angel forms),[1] while other names include portico of the idols,[2] or Goetria (it is mentioned as Goetria the Incantada by Stuart and Revett in 1754).[3] In modern times they are called the Caryatids of Salonica,[4][5][6][7] and also Elgins of Thessaloniki[8][9] based on their removal in 1864, similar to the sculptures of the Parthenon.[10]
Location
It is believed that the portico was located in the Jewish quarter of Rogos (area around today's Chalkeon Street next to the church of the same name) behind the Paradise Baths (Bey Hamam),[11][12] close to the Roman Forum. The fact that it had statues on both sides means that the use of the building was intended for both sides. Various assumptions have been made as to what its use was, it is quite likely that it was the entrance to the Roman market, or that it was a dividing border between the palaestra and the platform,[13] or even propylaea of the hippodrome.[14]
In a topographical plan by Ernest Hébrard, who was involved in the reconstruction of Thessaloniki after the Great Fire of 1917, its location was marked in the wider area behind the baths of Bay Hamam.[15]
History
Early descriptions
First depiction by Étienne Gravier d'Ortières, 1685.1745 engraving by Pococke.
The oldest reference to Las Incantadas comes courtesy of Italian traveller Cyriacus of Ancona in 1431, shortly after the Fall of Thessalonica to the Ottomans. He described it briefly as a demolished temple of Artemis on which figures of gods were depicted.[16] The first depiction of the portico was made between 1685 and 1687 by Frenchman Étienne Gravier d'Ortières,[17] where the basic layout of the monument is shown without a high level of detail, and is described as ruins of a palace. He was followed by British anthropologist Richard Pococke in 1740, who, although he described the sculptures of the columns, the designer who drew the pictures based on his descriptions depicted the monument without the sculptures as well as placing it in a fictional space that did not correspond to reality.[18]
The monument is also allegedly depicted on an unidentified, possibly Venetian, old map of Thessaloniki in which all the monuments of the city are marked with Italian descriptions. There under the title colonne (columns) it appears to have a total of 8 columns in two sections of 3 and 5 respectively which join each other forming an angle, the monument as it was originally if some other part of them had not been destroyed even earlier.[15]
Stuart and Revett
The most detailed description of the building with accompanying engravings was done in 1754 by British classicists James Stuart and Nicholas Revett who had been sent by the Society of Dilettanti,[19] producing a number of pictures and engravings that were published for the first time in the third volume of The Antiquities of Athens in 1762.[3] The monument is described as a Corinthian colonnade accompanied by statues at the top. In one of these pictures, where the building is depicted in its entirety, the inscription on the epistle Ν[-]ΓΕΓΕΝΗΜΕΝΟΝ[-]ΥΠΟ ('was made under') can be seen, possibly mentioning the name of the sponsor of the work or the local lord of city. The part with the inscription, however, was no longer preserved during the period of the representation, but it means that the portico of Las Incantadas was considerably larger on both sides. A significant part of the building was below ground, and its actual height was considerably greater. Carrying out a partial excavation, they determined the total height of the building to be 12.70 meters.[20]
Depiction of the building.
Reconstruction.
Detail of the columns.
Base detail.
In their writings they also conveyed the popular tradition of the Greek inhabitants, according to which the monument was part of a portico that connected with the palace of Alexander the Great. When the king of Thrace once visited the city, his wife fell in love with Alexander and they met secretly through this portico. As soon as the king found out about this, he had a magic spell cast on the building so that anyone passing by would be petrified. So the king's wife with her attendant were petrified and became statues, and so did the king with his magician who had gone to see if they had caught the witches, while Alexander did not appear that night as according to the story had been warned by his tutor Aristotle.[3]
Late eighteenth to twentieth centuries
Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel also produced engravings in 1782, which was published in 1831 by French archaeologist Esprit-Marie Cousinéry, with a drawing quite similar to that of the house by Stuart and Revett from the same angle.[21] In 1800 excavations around the building were carried out by French consul Félix de Beaujour who gave its total height as 12,5 meters, with a column length of 1,98 m. (including the bases) above ground 5,49 m. underneath.[20]
Similar buildings existed in various cities that were once part of the Roman Empire. In early twentieth century French archaeologist Paul Perdrizet,[22] who examined the sculptures after they had been moved to the Louvre, brought up the Piliers de Tutelle from the city Bordeaux in France, which shows several similarities but is no longer preserved as it was demolished in 1677.[23]
Fauvel 1782, published in 1831.
Piliers de Tutelle in Bordeaux, demolished in 1677
Removal
Emmanuel Miller was a French palaeologist who was sent on a mission by Napoleon III to acquire antiquities from other countries outside France. He was escorted by painter and photographer Pierre-Désiré Guillemet. Miller himself described their trip on a diary he kept,[24] where he says that at first he had gone to Mount Athos in order to find rare manuscripts. There, after facing the suspicion of the monks, he failed to collect anything of value, and then he passed on to Thasos, from which he obtained a large number of antiquities. During his meeting with the French consul, the consul told him that he should not leave anything behind or the British would take it. Learning about the attractions of Thessaloniki he learned about the monument that was located, he asked permission from the governor to remove the sculptures, but the pasha told him that he would have to get permission from the imperial capital Constantinople, which was done soon after as the French embassy intervened and the permission was given by the Grand Vizier.
The only known photo of La Incantadas in Salonica, 1864.
He came to Thessaloniki on October 30, 1864, arriving on a French warship, and he ran aground not in the port of the city but in another location on the advice of the French consul, so that the transfer of the antiquities would remain as unnoticed by the general public as possible.[25] Miller then learned from the French ambassador that a message had come from France asking him to expropriate not only the statues but the entire monument, statues, columns, metopes, etc. This proved impossible as the weight would have been enormous, as he did not have the necessary equipment but neither could the ship bear such a weight. The news of the removal of the monument were spread and caused an uproar among the Thessalonican population. Miller wrote how he did not understand why they reacted this way since the janissaries had a hobby of shooting the statues for fun, and the Jewish owner of the house next to the monument occasionally broke pieces and sold them to tourists.[25]
Shortly before the removal began, Guillemet took a photograph of the monument standing on a neighboring building, which is the only known photograph surviving of Las Incantadas' original location in Thessaloniki.[26][27][15] At the same time, it had become known that Las Incantadas would be removed, and there was an outcry from the inhabitants of the city (Turks, Jews and Greeks) and minor incidents followed. On November 1, Miller began the removal work, cordoned off the area, and had the assistance of Turkish police who kept the crowd at bay, while in the days that followed they would throw water at the crowd to keep it from congregating.[28]
So the slab that was over the statues was removed first, and then the statues themselves. One of them, that of the goddess Nike, fell to the ground as it escaped the winch and in its fall a small part of it that was not on the side of the sculpture was broken. On the 12th of November, the removal of the statues was completed, and their transport began, together with the archways and pillars, with the bullock carts that had been assisted by the Turkish pasha.[29] Transporting through the narrow streets of the city with its potholes and sharp corners proved to be particularly difficult. After the completion of the transport and unloading of the sculptures on the French warship, Miller extended his stay in the city for a few more weeks, until the end of December, and with regard to the heavier parts of the monument he stated in his writings that if he were unable to move them then he would leave them on the streets, and that perhaps the church of Hagios Nicolaos could make use these marbles.
Miller, not being an archaeologist himself, did not make any topographical studies or other notes about where the monument was located. When delivered to the Louvre, there was no accompanying inventory of the finds, and the pieces were mixed up with others taken from Thasos.[30]
The sculptures
Dating
The dating of the monument was based on the examination of the sculptures in the Louvre, and on the basis of the study of the representations of the travelers. Various periods have been proposed, from the mid-second century to the end of the third, with the consensus being in the second century. Initially it was suggested that the monument was from the Diocletian period (late third to early fourth century) as it shows some architectural similarities with Diocletian's Palace near ancient Salona. However, there was the counter-argument that there are differences in the dimensions of the capitals, and at the same time in terms of the representations of the sculptures, especially those of Aura and Dionysus, indicate that the statues cannot belong to later periods when the art had already begun to change, which is however not absolute. The main argument for dating it to the second century focuses on the fact that the Corinthian-style capitals show many similarities to those found in two small second-century temples in the market of Philippi, as well as to other architectural finds of the same period on the facade of the Captives in Corinth,[31] and the Odeon of Agrippa in Athens. Based on these details, the style of the monument and the sculptures are influenced by Hellenistic art, while the work itself seems to be a typical example of the local Greek architecture of Thessaloniki.[32]
The mythological figures
The deities and mortal people depicted in the portico are eight in total, arranged in pairs of two for each of the four pillars. The figures are Dionysus, the god of wine; Ariadne, his wife and princess of Crete; Aura, a breeze goddess associated with Bacchic myth; a Maenad, a female follower of Dionysus; Leda, queen of Sparta; Ganymede, cup-bearer of the gods; Nike, goddess of victory; and finally one of the Dioscuri, the twin sons of Leda. They are paired together as follows: Leda with Ganymede (two mortals seduced by Zeus in the form of an animal), Nike with the Maenad (close companions of a specific deity, Athena and Dionysus respectively), Ariadne with the Dioscurus (demigods who eventually ascended to godhood) and Dionysus with Aura (in some versions, Aura is the mother of Iacchus by Dionysus).
In 1997, during the excavation work for a natural gas supply in Rogoti Street, well south of the ancient market, part of the head of a sculpture was discovered, which has been hypothesized to be part of a fifth statue, which collapsed during an earthquake in the seventh century.[33] This assumption is based on the similarity of the sculpture as well as the fact that in the representations of the monument each column is accompanied by a statue with the exception of the fifth column. That fragment is now exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.[7] The fragment is of a damaged head with a wing next to it, and it has been identified as Nike, thanks to its identicalness with the Nike of the surviving column in the Louvre.[34]
In the same year, on the occasion of the year of Thessaloniki as the European Capital of Culture, a request was made by the municipality of Thessaloniki to the French government for the return of the sculptures to the city, but the request was not successful.
In 2015, thanks to funding from the organization of the Thessaloniki International Fair and the participation of other local bodies in Greece it became possible faithful copies of the sculptures in the Louvre to be built, the final cost of which amounted to 150,000 euros.[35] They were exhibited at the 80th TIF and then the copies were transferred in 2015 to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki where they have been ever since in permanent exhibition.[36][37][38]
Μαζάουερ, Μαρκ (2006). Θεσσαλονίκη, πόλη των φαντασμάτων : Χριστιανοί, Μουσουλμάνοι και Εβραίοι 1430-1950. Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Αλεξάνδρεια. p. 264-271. ISBN9799602213543.
Μέντζος, Αριστοτέλης (1997). "Πρόταση για την ερμηνεία των "ειδώλων" (incantadas) της Θεσσαλονίκης με αφορμή νεότερα ευρήματα". Το Αρχαιολογικό Έργο στη Μακεδονία και στη Θράκη. Vol. 11. Θεσσαλονίκη. pp. 379–392.((cite book)): CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)[dead link]
See also
Parthenon marbles, similar case of ancient sculptures taken from Greece in the 19th century
.jpg)
.jpg)
_-_Stuart_James_%26_Revett_Nicholas_-_1794.jpg)
_(cropped).JPG)
_Maenad_(cropped).jpg)
_Leda_(cropped).jpg)
