On the evening of Jan. 18, a 32-year old Greek man went to the police with an unusual object that he said he had found in a plastic bag among trash bins near the northern city of Thessaloniki. It was a headless, armless statue depicting a female form in a flowing, draped garment.

Ancient statues have been found in trash before in Europe. In 2023, a Roman-era statuette of Venus was discovered in a trash dump in Rennes, France. That same year, ancient bronze statues were found in a garbage dump in Tuscany, Italy.

Police in Greece say a marble statue of a woman believed to be more than 2,000 years old has been found abandoned in a garbage bag and handed to archaeologists.

A man found the headless statue of a woman just outside Greece's second biggest city before handing it over to local authorities. | ITV National News