The marble capital of the Ionic order, with Inv. No. MΘ 2656, is preserved in very good condition, except for a carving in the center of one of its faces and two parallel grooves in its upper part. These interventions are due to its last use of the capital, as a "...footstool of the episcopal throne of Panagouda (Temple of Virgin Mary) in Thessaloniki..." (see photo). It was removed from this position in the early 1960s, to be exhibited in the Archaeological Museum of the city, which was being built at the time.
The capital is 1.71 m long and 0.83 m wide, so it is obvious that it comes from a public building. It dates to 500-480 BC, because its "helixes" are concave towards the outer side of the colonnade (with palmettes in their center) and convex towards the inner side (towards the temple). Spear-shaped leaves sprout from the tendrils, above a row of carved “eggs”. The lateral facades of the capital are adorned with wide and deep, vertical grooves. It has probably been built by a Thasian artistic workshop, using white marble from that very island.
A capital identical to this, was collected at the same time from Polichni, Thessaloniki, where it had been used as a public fountain basin, while dozens of marble architectural fragments, bases and parts of columns of the same archaic building came to light from time to time in various parts of the city until 2000. As Thessaloniki was founded about two centuries after the construction of the temple, the findings were associated by some researchers with a temple in the neighboring ancient city of Thermi, while in 1996 it was proposed that they had originated from the temple of the goddess Aphrodite in the city of Aenea, on Megalo Emvolon Cape. According to this view, parts of this temple could have been transported to Thessaloniki in the time of Emperor Octavian Augustus, along with the transfer of the cult of Aphrodite, the mythical ancestor of the emperor himself. And they could have been incorporated into a newly built temple, dedicated to the worship of the emperor.
The latter hypothesis was strengthened in 2000, with the discovery of the foundations of that newer temple, on which an archaic base of a corresponding Ionic column rested. Continuation of the rescue excavation on the plot (on the eastern boundary of Antigonidon Square, in the center of the city) revealed a statue of Zeus Aigiochos and the torso of a statue of an emperor wearing a breastplate. The plot was finally expropriated, in order to protect and highlight this cultic monument, with such turbulent architectural - and political - history.
You can see the capital at the last stop of the Museum's permanent exhibition "Thessaloniki, Macedonia Metropolis", as part of a peculiar restoration of the eastern part of this Roman temple.
