The Sweet Water that Heals: A Marble Relief as an Occasion for Narratives about Thessaloniki
The inscribed votive relief was found in 1954 in Thessaloniki and specifically, according to the museum's inventory book and the first published reference, on Gyzi Street, which extends in the upper parts of Thessaloniki within the city walls, between Kassandrou and Vlachava Streets. It dates from the late 2nd/early3rd century AD and bears the inventory number MTh 2205.
The fragment of the marble relief depicts the legs, from the knees downwards, of three female figures. They are wearing long garments and their legs, in a strong stride, are treading on wavy lines suggesting water. These are probably three Nymphs, deities of water springs and running waters, who are depicted dancing.
Above the figures, the epigram would have begun, the continuation of which we can read under the wavy lines. According to the epigram, written on a dactylic hexameter, the relief was dedicated, apparently to the Nymphs, by Atalos as an expression of his gratitude for being cured of illness by drinking "sweet" water.
The epigram, with a suggested completion in brackets, is as follows:
[Ἀντιχαριζόµενος Νύµφας ἐστήσατο]
τάσδε Ἄταλος ἐκπροφυγὼν νοῦσον πόµασι
γλυκεροῖσιν
(As a gift in return to the Nymphs, Atalos, who was saved from illness by drinking sweet water, set it up)
The iconography of the relief makes it very likely that the water spring was a place of worship of the Nymphs, to which healing properties were attributed. The location of the sanctuary is not known. A short distance from the site where the relief was found, an excavation in Mouson Street revealed a sanctuary which, according to one interpretation, is associated with the cult of the Nymphs. In the surrounding area natural water springs later associated with Christian worship, such as the Holy Water of the Holy Belt or the other one of the Apostle Paul, it is uncertain whether they echo the cult of the Nymphs in the Roman period.
The epigraphist Charles Edson, when he published the inscription of the relief, hinted at the association of the water of the sanctuary of the Nymphs with the monastery of St. Demetrius of the Spring. According to Byzantine literary sources, it was located in a place of natural beauty a short distance from Thessaloniki. In The Miracles of St. Demetrius, a text by an anonymous author of the 10th century (Book C; 4th Miracle; S. Demetrii Martyris Acta, Migne J. P., Patrologia Graeca (PG), 116, 1393-1396), it is reported that an official was cured of intense pains in the joints, when, under the guidance of the saint who appeared in his sleep, he washed his body with the pure, sweet and slightly cold water of the spring that gushed from a crevice in the rock next to the Christian sanctuary, which has since been renamed the monastery of St. Demetrius of Harmogenes. Its location is not known. It may have been located in the suburban forest of Sheikh-Su, whose Turkish name (in Greek, the Sheikh's Water) refers to a fountain that existed there.
