In brief
Nine artefacts from the ancient city of Apollonia Pontica will join a large exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, running from December 20, 2026 to April 11, 2027. The pieces, including a carved relief of the goddess Cybele and the country's oldest marble kouros, are being shipped from Burgas and Sozopol. The exhibition will feature more than 180 items from the Black Sea region and beyond, highlighting the area’s historical importance.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open on December 20, 2026 a new exhibition titled Across Wine‑Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece, featuring nine artefacts from the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia Pontica, present‑day Sozopol on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.
When the exhibition concludes on April 11, 2027 it will have brought together more than 180 works of art and archaeological objects, spanning the Eastern Mediterranean, western Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia and the Apennine Peninsula. The collection draws on major museums, including the Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, to highlight the cultural exchanges that defined the ancient world.
Two of the nine pieces come from the Regional History Museum in Burgas. The first is a stone relief that depicts the goddess Cybele; it dates from the first half of the fifth century BC and was recovered from the waters of Sozopol Harbour. The second is a carved marble statue known as a kouros—a life‑size figure of a young male, often shown with one foot forward, which represents youthful idealism in early Greek sculpture.
The remaining seven artefacts are loaned by the Municipal Cultural Institute Museum Centre in Sozopol. They include a collection of ceramic vessels that were used in religious rites, a bronze axle from an ancient cart, a bronze amphora lid, a marble fragment that may have been part of a larger statue, a fragment of a bronze plaque, a marble fragment with a stylised fish motif and a bronze jewellery piece. These items provide a snapshot of the daily and spiritual practices in the city during the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
The two Burgas objects were dispatched to New York on November 12, and their transport took three days. A specialist team packed the stone sculptures in custom‑made crates and built ramps to load them onto a truck. The Sozopol items have not yet been shipped, but they remain in the museum’s conservation labs, awaiting clearance and custom paperwork.
"The Black Sea is represented in the exhibition exclusively through Apollonia Pontica, with artefacts from the collections of the museums in Burgas and Sozopol," said Dimitar Nedev, director of the Sozopol museum.Nedev added that the display was
