The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open a new exhibition, titled “Across Wine‑Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece,” featuring nine artifacts from the ancient Greek colony of Apollonia Pontica, located in present‑day Sozopol, Bulgaria. The show is scheduled to run from December 20, 2026, to April 11, 2027, and will bring together more than 180 works taken from the collections of institutions across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea basin, Western Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia and the Apennine Peninsula.
According to the Bulgarian news agency BTA, seven of the displayed items come from the Municipal Cultural Institute Museum Centre in Sozopol, while two are part of the Regional History Museum in Burgas. Sozopol Museum Director Dimitar Nedev said that the Black Sea is represented in the exhibition exclusively through Apollonia Pontica, with artifacts from the Burgas and Sozopol collections. He called the inclusion “significant recognition of the region’s archaeological heritage and of the ancient city’s role in cultural contacts between the Greek world and the people along the western Black Sea coast.”
“The Black Sea is represented in the exhibition exclusively through Apollonia Pontica, with artefacts from the collections of the museums in Burgas and Sozopol,” Nedev told BTA.
The two Burgas artifacts are a stone stone relief of the goddess Cybele, dated to the first half of the 5th century BCE, discovered in the waters of Sozopol Harbour, and a marble kouros of a young man from the 6th to early 5th century BCE, found on Atia Peninsula. The kouros is the oldest marble statue currently held in Bulgarian museums. Both pieces were dispatched from Bulgary to New York on November 12, the Regional History Museum team said; the transport preparations took three days, involving specialist packing and the use of specially designed transport crates and ramps.
Seven ceramic vessels that were used in the religious practices of ancient Apollonians remain awaiting shipment to the United States. These vessels, along with the two Burgas artifacts, form a core of Apollonia‑Pontica material culture that BTA reports will be displayed alongside prisms of antiquity from globally recognised institutions such as the Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the National Archaeological Museum in Taranto, the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade, the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion in Crete, the Archaeological Museum of Samos, the Archaeological Museum of Córdoba and the Albacete Museum in Spain.
While the BTA coverage focuses on the logistics and significance of the Bulgarian contributions, it also highlights the exhibition’s broader ambition: to illuminate the artistic and cultural identities that shaped the ancient Mediterranean beyond the mainstream narratives of mainland Greece. By assembling works from the Western and Eastern fringes of the Greek world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is aiming to showcase the permeable borders of ancient cultural exchange, a theme reflected in its inclusive selection of regionally‑specific and universally archetypal artifacts.
Readers can anticipate the display of the Apollonia‑Pontica artifacts to arrive in the museum’s “Middle Eastern” and “Eastern Mediterranean” galleries, and to be supplemented by comparable works from the broad Eurasian landscape, allowing visitors to traverse an artistic continuum that stretches from the eastern fringes of the Greek world to the heart of Classical antiquity.
