Costas Finds and Excavates the Aphrodite Statue

The discovery of the Aphrodite statue begins not with a visible image but with a sound: a bright, bell-like note beneath Costas Arvanitis’s spade. As he uncovers a face-down marble body on his smallholding, practical work gives way to wonder and then to an intensely personal attachment. His determination to excavate the figure alone makes the find both a physical undertaking and a turning point in his ordinary life.

The first sound beneath the soil

A dry winter had left the ground hard, making the work of preparing the land for planting unusually slow. Costas had spent the day digging on his smallholding, a few hectares in extent, about half planted with orange and olive trees. At around eight in the evening, as the sun went down and the moon rose over the hills, his spade struck something. The sound was not the familiar metallic knock of iron on flint, a common nuisance in the rocky ground, but a clear, ringing ching that he had never heard before. That difference was the first sign that his routine encounter with stones might be something else.

Near darkness, he scraped soil away with his fingernails and saw what looked like a large white stone. It would not come free, and he left it until morning. The pause matters: at first, the discovery is not yet an image or an identity, only a stubborn object and an unfamiliar tone. Costas’s labor had strained his body, but the patch of land was also his reason to rise each day and the center of his life. The buried object enters that intimate, work-worn landscape before it acquires any mythic meaning.

A patient excavation

The next morning, Costas returned with tools from his pick-up, including a spade and trowel, and a small bottle of brandy from the dashboard in his pocket. The trip took about twenty minutes; the road was empty, and even with the accelerator pressed down, the speedometer scarcely reached thirty kilometres an hour. Usually he had no reason to hurry, but this day felt different. At the site, wind had shifted a few millimetres of earth, exposing more of the pale stone. Its pearly sheen made the spade seem too rough a tool, so he brushed the surface with his hands.

He worked through the morning, trying to make sense of a broad, apparently edgeless expanse beneath the soil. He supposed that recent seismic movement might have shifted the earth and brought the object near the surface; clearing it, he thought, would also help the vegetables growing above it. When the stone seemed to rise into a small mound, he resumed digging and levered away heavy clods, piling the earth around the excavation. The task took longer than he expected. He continued for several hours, then went home without his usual stop at the kafenion. His wife complained about his lateness; outside, the quiet gave him room to return in thought to the find.

By noon on the third day, the smooth, sculpted surface had made clear that this was no ordinary stone. As Costas removed more soil, he recognized the rounded form of a woman’s buttocks, then traced the subtle indentation of a spine with his finger. By mid-afternoon he had exposed a section roughly forty by eighty centimetres. Only when he stood to stretch and looked down at the work did he grasp the larger shape: a woman lying face down, with her back exposed, one arm at her side and the other ending at the elbow. Raised in a rural village and never having visited a museum, Costas had little experience that could have prepared him for the sight.

From ancient figure to private beloved

The narrative identifies the woman as Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and presents Costas’s response as love beginning at first sound rather than first sight. The statue had lain buried for millennia; her sculptor, the account observes, had not merely represented a goddess but believed the figure to be the goddess herself. Costas experiences something of that conviction’s force. The discovery is therefore not simply that he has unearthed a carved body: he comes to regard the figure as a living presence, though he does not yet know her face or even her name.

When the statue lies exposed in its entirety, still face down and naked, Costas sees her as perfect, sensual, and strong. His curiosity about her face is intense, but he postpones turning her until the next day. Around midnight he covers her with a blanket and addresses her as his beloved. The gesture gives the excavation a private, almost protective character: the unearthed object is no longer treated as material to be cleared away, but as someone to whom he feels devoted.

The change reaches beyond the hours spent at the site. Costas thinks of her constantly, and his dreams are filled with her image. The ordinary irritations of his days—the struggle of labor, his wife’s complaints, political bickering, and the weary faces at the kafenion—are displaced by what the narration calls the presence of love. This transformation is presented through contrast: the same man who had found little urgency in reaching any destination now hurries back to the land, and a life organized around repetitive work acquires a compelling new focus.

The unfinished turn

At sunrise the next morning, Costas returns with his heart beating fast and removes the blanket. The early light makes the marble appear whiter and purer, with hints of crystal sparkling in it. He prepares wooden planks and rope to lever the body over. The work would normally call for half a dozen men, but he does not want to share his woman with anyone and insists on doing it alone. His choice turns private attachment into a practical obstacle: the statue’s size and the danger of damaging it make the task difficult, while his refusal to involve others denies him the help the work would ordinarily require.

The first attempts fail, and throughout them Costas fears that the marble will break. Only around three in the afternoon do the planks, rope, and leverage finally work together. As he leans down on the lever, the woman rises slightly from her sleeping position. The episode’s decisive movement is thus incomplete: the figure begins to turn, but the passage stops before her face is revealed. The discovery has already changed Costas’s habits and emotional world; the promised recognition of the face remains just beyond the ending, suspended between the statue’s ancient stillness and the man’s urgent desire to see her.