Nikolaos Laskaris and the only Aphrodite of his life

"When your house is burning or when your ship is sinking and you only have one object to take with you, what you choose certainly means a lot to you. I don't think the statuette of Aphrodite that Nikolaos Laskaris chose was a random choice," Dr Kostas Paschalidis, curator in the Department of Prehistoric, Egyptian, Cypriot and Near Eastern Collections at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (NAM), tells Kathimerini, as he explains the story behind a new object presented in the context of NAM's "Unseen Museum" exhibition project.

It is a fragment (from lower torso to the knees) of a marble statuette of Aphrodite from the late Hellenistic period, originating in modern-day Bursa, northwestern Turkey. The ancient sculpture was delivered to the NAM by the young curator of antiquities, Nikolaos Laskaris, on the eve of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Ιt remained unidentified in...