Kouros of Apollonas

A giant

The kouros is 10.7 metres tall and weighs around 80 tonnes

The Kouros of Apollonas is an unfinished statue of light grey Naxian marble, 10.7 metres tall. It lies in an ancient quarry near Apollonas, in the north of Naxos, and dates from around the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

80 tonnesthe estimated weight of the statue

The name

It was long called Apollo, but the beard points to Dionysus

The statue was formerly considered to be Apollo because it lies near the town of Apollonas. Most kouroi show young men, but this one was to be an older man with a beard, and Wilhelm von Massow identified it as Dionysos in 1932.

The method

Sculptors worked on the whole figure at once, layer by layer

The sculptors never worked on a leg, arm or head individually, but always on the whole sculpture, so the whole figure was at the same stage at each moment. They used bronze chisels, which left numerous holes in the sculpture.

Left behind

No route was ever cut to carry it away, so it stayed in the quarry

Keyholes and a rectangular hole for a wooden lifting beam show where it would have been lifted. But a route for the further transport of the statue was never carved into the stone. The archaeologist Gruben holds that the monolith was too heavy to transport.

Its kin

Two more unfinished kouroi lie at Melanes

Two more unfinished kouroi, over life size, lie in a village garden at Melanes on Naxos. From the same marble quarry came the Colossus of the Naxians, about 9 metres high and 25 tons, which was completed and set up on Delos but is now in fragments.