Mothers, Priestesses, Fighters: Story of Greek Islands Retold Through Women’s Eyes

Photo courtesy of Paris Tavitian/Museum of Cycladic Art. Retrieved from balkaninsight.com

Ιn the Stathatos Mansion, a 19th-century Neoclassical building in the centre of Athens, a 2.48-metre-tall archaic statue of a woman stands imposingly.

The Kore of Thera, one of the few almost intact statues from the ancient city of Thera on the island of Santorini, is being exhibited in Greece for the first time.

The statue is featured in the exhibition “Kykladitisses: Untold Stories of Women of the Cyclades”, dedicated to the untold stories of women from the Aegean islands from antiquity to the 19th century, and how their roles were shaped by their island environment.

The exhibition “brings together for the first time so many masterpieces of the Cyclades under one roof”, the head of the museum, Sandra Marinopoulou, says.

“We tried to listen to the women through their own voices,” the museum’s academic director Panagiotis Iossif, who is also professor of ancient numismatics at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, told BIRN.

Statuettes and large-sized sculptures, vases, jewellery, coins, funerary stelae, inscriptions with legal texts, frescoes, mosaics, engravings, manuscripts and icons, ranging from prehistoric to post-Byzantine times, are some of the exhibits in the exhibition that narrate the stories of women either through their own eyes, but almost always through the eyes of men.