Gate to Greece > Travel in Greece > Mykonos Island > Mykonos Town > Archaeological Museum
<Location > Mykonos (Mikonos) Island, Cyclades, Greece
Archaeological Museum situated at Mykonos Town. It was constructed in 1902 to house the archaeological objects found in Reneia island in 1898. There are also some finds from Mykonos.
In the photos above, left and below is the large ceramic ware called pithon, found in Mykonos island in 1961. Seventh century BC. 1.40 metre high.
The whole surface is covered with reliefs depicting the fall of Troy and massacre of women and children. On the neck you see the Trojan Horse (photo below).
I guess it is a funerary monument. On the front side there is an inscription (left: but it is difficult to see). We often find this type of base with a kind of footprints on, which is the base of standing statues. In this case, however, the footprints are so real that it seems to be a monument in itself.
Ceramic and glass dolls and rings.
This museum collects many funerary monuments found on the island of Rheneia, uninhabited islet in front of Delos. When the Athenians took the leadership of the Delian league, they prohibited the Delians to die and to be buried on Delos, and, as a consequence, Rheneia became the graveyard for the Delians.
I collected some of the funerary monuments below. Left below is a funerary stele found on Rheneia. Second to the first century BC. It has the same composition as the grave stone of Tertia Horaria (below). Right below is the grave of a man called Glykon. He must have lost life in the sea; the young man seated on the rock is contemplative and melancholic, and there is prow of a ship to the right. Second to the first century BC.
These two persons seem to have died in the sea, too. On the stele left below, there is a ship upside down, and on the right one, there is a ship and a man swimming (or being drawned).
This is a grave stele of a woman called Tertia Horaria, found on Rheneia, in the Hellenistic cemetery. In original settings, this stele was standing on a bigger monument that included her sarcophagus with her name on it. Second to the first century BC.
The woman seated is the deceased woman, and the man standing to the right is her husband. Both lost their right hands, but they must be shaking hands, as a typical pose of the deceased on the funerary reliefs (see the one of another couple, above). At the feet of Tertia, there is another woman, presumably her slave, standing holding a box.
Related Links
Greek Ministry of Culture:
Archaeological Museum of Mykonos
Reference
• Robin Barber,
Greece (Blue Guide), London- N.Y. 2001 (Revised reprint of the 6th edition of 1995), p. 648.
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