Mystery at the Met- The Hidden History of the Cyclades in NYC

Berlin- I published my first long form history vlog in a while about the mysterious origins of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cycladic culture collection back home in NYC. These idols, or figurines, are inherently fascinating because for what seems to be the bulk of them, their exact provenance (island, site, exact date of excavation) seems to have been lost to history. That’s a polite way of saying many, if not most of them, were likely looted in the decades after the mid-century Greek civil war. Reading the labels at the Met certainly doesn’t help matters either. The room for ambiguity could fill a gallery.

I’ve been traveling to the Cyclades regularly since the late 1990s, mostly just for kicks. I’ve always had a love of Greece of the classical world, marble columns jutting skyward like arms outstretched toward the cosmos. The pantheon of deities that ruled our world, or perhaps just the Hellenic world, before the birth of Christ populates our collective imagination to this day. But that all seemed to largely be the concern of the Greek mainland.

The Cyclades were architecturally (in the classical sense) desolate holiday destinations for fun and frolic. They simply don’t generally evoke antiquity for the most part with notable exceptions being of course the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos and the Portara at the port of Naxos. No one working in tourism bothers trying to enthrall the young and debauched with the enigma that is the obscure, mostly forgotten culture that inhabited these islands millenia before the Hellenes. But you know who is enthralled by these ‘earth mother-goddesses?’ Secretive billionaire collectors who just have to have them tas if o have a piece of everything. And these tycoons are in cahoots with the major museums and auction houses much to the Greek government’s chagrin.

The picturesque Portara, on the islet of Palatia adjacent Naxos’ port, stands as somewhat large scale rare relic of Hellenism in the over touristed Cyclades. ©2019 Derek Henry Flood

Cumulatively I’ve spent at least a year of my life in this heavily desertified archipelago in the heart of the Aegean Sea. In all that time I’ve never learned a single thing about the Cycladic civilsation from the Early Bronze Age that called these islands home. I only learned of their existence some years back on a foray into the Archaeological Museum when I saw the mysterious idols populating one of the main galleries. Nothing about their style connotes ‘Greek’ to the casual observer. They look more like a minute version of the moai on Easter Island than anything resembling the sharp facial features of Apollo or Athena. And that speaks to their universality in terms of the artistic expressions of early man. Well before the age of antiquity when societies began to form city-states with far more distinctive artistic traditions, their distant Bronze Age predecessors carved these maternal idols with simple obsidian blades sourced from Milos out of the white marble quarried on Naxos.

These diminutive Cycladic idols on display in Athens captured my imagination as soon as I saw them. Wht I had never heard about them on the islands themselves? They look like nothing else in the Archaeological Museum. If anything, the mystery of their origins only enhances the allure of Greece in that its history is much deeper than most of us are aware. ©2015 Derek Henry Flood

Is this seated male harpist a decades-old forgery hewed on Ios in 1947 by a man calledAngelos Koutsoupis? The Met insists it’s indisputably authentic. 21st century researchers claim otherwise. Thus it sits quietly amidst the clatter of crowds passing through the Met each day unquestioned. Yet even to my untrained eye it appears to in almost suspiciously good condition compared to every other artifact on display in gallery 150. Scholars who reinforce the Met’s position claim that there are minuscule remnants of pigment on the harpist’s face not visible to the naked eye which no 20th century forger would’ve bothered to add.