In brief
Nine pieces from the ancient city of Apollonia Pontica will form part of a broader show on the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, debuting at the Metropolitan Museum in December 2026. The items include a goddess Cybele relief and the nation’s oldest marble kouros, representing the cultural crossroads between Greek and Black Sea peoples. The exhibition gathers over 180 works from institutions across Europe and North Africa.
Nine archaeological artefacts that trace the heritage of the ancient Greek‑influenced city of Apollonia Pontica in present-day Sozopol, Bulgaria, have been selected for display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art under the exhibition title Across Wine‑Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece. The nine items, seven from the Municipal Cultural Institute Museum Centre in Sozopol and two from the Regional History Museum in Burgas, will be on view from 20 December 2026 until 11 April 2027.
Sozopol museum director Dimitar Nedev told the Bulgarian news agency BTA that the exhibit now “represents the Black Sea exclusively through Apollonia Pontica, with artefacts from the collections of the museums in Burgas and Sozopol.” According to Nedev, the display spotlights the ancient city’s role in cultural exchanges between the Greek world and peoples along the western Black Sea coast.
“The Black Sea is represented in the exhibition exclusively through Apollonia Pontica, with artefacts from the collections of the museums in Burgas and Sozopol,”
Speaking before the exhibition’s opening, Nedev called the arrangement “significant recognition of the region's archaeological heritage.”
The two Bulgarians museum pieces were sent to New York the week before the opening, with the Regional History Museum team reporting that the sculptures were dispatched on 12 November. Preparations for the transport took three days. A specialist team packed the stone pieces, placed them in specially designed crates and built ramps for loading onto a truck.
One of the Burgas‑origin sculptures is a relief of the goddess Cybele that dates to the first half of the 5th century BCE. It was discovered in the waters of Sozopol Harbour and is described by the museum as a “model example of Greek art on Black Sea territory.”
The second stone work is a marble kouros, a statue of a young man belonging to the 6th‑to‑early 5th century BCE. The sculpture was found on Atia Peninsula and is noted as the oldest marble statue currently held in Bulgarian museums.
Sozopol’s seven vessels, all ceramic, are still in transport to the United States. The vessels were identified by the Sozopol museum as belonging to the city’s religious practices, and are said to illustrate the local practice of religious offerings to the gods and the societal structure that supported them.
“The seven ceramic vessels are associated with the religious practices of ancient Apollonians— in many ways expressing the cosmological and societal values that guided daily life. We do not yet have a final decision on whether the vessel’s shapes were functional or symbolic,” the director added, indicating that the items remain under study as they pass between institutions.
In addition to the Bulgarian items, the exhibition will feature 180 works from the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, western Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia and the Apennine Peninsula. The piece will draw on works from multiple major museum collections, including the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the National Archaeological Museum in Taranto, the National Museum of Serbia, the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion in Crete, the Archaeological Museum of Samos, the Archaeological Museum of Cordoba and the Albacete Museum in Spain.
Historically, Apollonia Pontica was a Greek colony that merged Albanian, Thracian, and indigenous influence and had a thriving economy that extended across the Black Sea. Today’s displays reinforce the city’s legacy as a cultural nexus that bridged the maritime world with communities along the Black Sea’s western shoreline.
With the museum opening, the artifacts highlighted a continuum of human expression across millennia, from royal marble sculptures to everyday domestic ceramics. The carefully curated exhibition hopes to illuminate the interwoven nature of ancient Greek art and the diverse communities that lived and traded along the Black Sea’s shoreline.
