On the occasion of the new activity for children, entitled "Sunday Storytime at the Museum", which was inaugurated in November at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, we reintroduce the public to the humble funerary monument of two little girls and the touching story of its journey to Thessaloniki.
Grave stele from the Raidestos Collection (ΜΘ 2445) with a representation of two girls of preschool and school age
The relief is made from a piece of white, fine-grained marble and is preserved in a fairly good. It is rather small, with a surviving height of 31 cm., width of 25.4 cm. and thickness of 10 cm. The sculptor used the lower, widened part of a column, as shown by the carvings preserved on its lateral sides, initially serving as a support for a table or a perirrhanterion. A shallow niche with a frame and an arched crown is formed on the front surface, in which the representation is carved.
Within the concave field of the niche, two frontal figures of standing young girls are presented. On the right, towards the viewer, the elder girl is resting on her left leg and has her right one slightly bent. She wears a floor-length garment with a long folding. She holds a scroll in front of her chest with her right hand, while with her lowered left hand a scroll case, both indicative of the first stage of school age. Next to her, the younger girl wears a slightly shorter chiton, girded high at the waist with a wide belt, and holds a spherical object in her right hand (perhaps a fruit or a ball) and in her bent left hand possibly a small bird. The children have similar features, with a round face and large almond-shaped eyes, while their hairstyle is briefly rendered. Under the relief, there is a single-line inscription: ΔΗΜCACEHPA, with the names of the deceased girls, probably read as Demea and Seera.
The relief is dated to the 2nd – 3rd century AD. and belongs to the “Raidestos Collection”, a corpus of sculptures collected by the Thracian Educational Association of Raidestos (T.E.A.R.), which was transferred to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in October 1922. In the last decades of the 19th century, many educational, cultural and charitable associations were founded within the Ottoman Empire, an important activity of which was the rescue and collection of ancient monuments, especially those bearing inscriptions. The provenance of this specific relief is mentioned in the Inscriptions’ List of the T.E.A.R. as Constantinople.
Our relief is kept in the Museum’s storerooms. It was included in the temporary exhibition “Raidestos – Thessaloniki. Antiquities on a refugee journey”, presented at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki (2016-2017) and the Archaeological Museum of Alexandroupolis (2018-2020).
Recently, it came out of storage again, for a new activity of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, entitled “Sunday Storytime at the Museum”. Young children of today’s Thessaloniki learned about the common fate of some ancient “children”: a statue of a little boy from Roman times, known as “The Little Refugee”, who was transferred after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) from Nyssa of Asia Minor to the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the girls of our relief, who followed the Greek refugees from the land of ancient Thrace, ending up in their new homeland, Thessaloniki.
