---
title: "At Perperikon, After Twenty-Six Years of Digging, the Mountain Gives Up a Statue"
description: "A pedestal and sculptural fragments in the ancient Bulgarian rock city are the first evidence of monumental figures"
author: "Walter Pine"
published: 2026-09-27T23:44:34Z
modified: 2026-09-28T01:11:53Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/at-perperikon-after-twenty-six-years-of-digging-the-mountain-5e30f7
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "perperikon", "statues", "bulgaria", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# At Perperikon, After Twenty-Six Years of Digging, the Mountain Gives Up a Statue

*A pedestal and sculptural fragments in the ancient Bulgarian rock city are the first evidence of monumental figures*

By Walter Pine · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/at-perperikon-after-twenty-six-years-of-digging-the-mountain-5e30f7

## In brief

- Excavators at Perperikon in southern Bulgaria found the city’s first monumental statuary after 26 years of digging
- The finds: a pedestal, part of a life-size male statue, and a fragment possibly from an animal, perhaps a lion
- Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov dates the pieces to the third to early sixth centuries AD, from the city’s Sacred Zone
- Ovcharov cites 435 statues known in Rome alone from AD 284 to 604, showing statuary persisted into Late Antiquity
- The fragments are of local stone by local craftsmen; this season’s urban-planning results are expected in October

The find that rewrites a site’s history is not always a statue. Sometimes it is the stone the statue stood on. In the Southern Quarter of Perperikon, the ancient rock city in southern Bulgaria, archaeologists this season uncovered a pedestal, part of a life-size male figure, and a second sculptural fragment that may have belonged to an animal — perhaps a lion, though the identification remains uncertain. They are modest objects. They are also, after twenty-six years of excavation, the first direct evidence that monumental statues once stood among the city’s temples and mausoleums.

The pieces emerged in the final weeks of this year’s excavation campaign, which has run for nearly four months. According to excavation director Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov, speaking to Arkeonews, they date from the Late Roman and Late Antique periods — the third century to the early sixth century AD — and they lay within the so-called Area Sacra, the Sacred Zone, where earlier digging has brought to light temples and mausoleums associated with the city’s wealthy inhabitants.

## What took twenty-six years

The wait is the point. Decades of work at Perperikon have produced abundant proof of monumental architecture: columns, capitals, cornices, carved stonework of every structural kind. Large-scale figurative sculpture, the statues that such a city would ordinarily be expected to have, had never turned up. The pedestal and the fragments close that gap. Buildings had been found in profusion; the people carved in stone had been missing from them.

Where the fragments lay raises the obvious question of whom the statues depicted. Ovcharov suggests they may once have decorated the religious and funerary buildings around them. One possibility is that the male figure portrayed an important local man buried in one of the nearby mausoleums. No firm identification has been made, and none is claimed.

## Local stone, local hands

The sculptures were carved from local stone, and the archaeological team attributes them to local craftsmen. That would be consistent with a pattern the site has already shown: Perperikon’s builders were highly skilled at shaping stone for monumental construction, while its figurative work appears to have followed a less technically refined local tradition — distinctive, sometimes relatively simple in style. The new fragments seem to belong to that same artistic environment.

Far from diminishing the find, the provincial character is what gives it its weight. The statues show how the inhabitants of a mountain city read the artistic conventions of the wider Roman world and rendered them in their own materials, by their own hands, to their own taste. For Ovcharov, that individuality is one of Perperikon’s enduring traits: across successive periods, the city developed its own approaches to architecture and art rather than copying models from elsewhere.

## Statues did not vanish in Late Antiquity

The discovery also places Perperikon inside a broader argument about public sculpture after the empire’s classical centuries. Monumental statuary declined in Late Antiquity, but it did not disappear. Ovcharov notes that archaeologists have classified 435 statues in Rome alone dating from AD 284 to 604 — from the reign of Diocletian to that of Phocas. The people they commemorated grew steadily more various: alongside emperors such as Constantine the Great and Valentinian I stood Christian clergymen, generals, senior officials, celebrated charioteers and physicians.

The Perperikon fragments cannot yet be tied to any individual, emperor or charioteer. What they establish is simpler and, for the site, new: monumental sculpture belonged to the visual fabric of the mountain city during this period, not only in Rome but here.

The team is now entering the final two weeks of what Ovcharov describes as an exceptionally productive season, and the results of this year’s study of Perperikon’s urban planning are expected to be presented in October — part of what appears to be a wider reassessment of how the city developed. The pedestal, for its part, has already done its work. Perperikon was not only a city of stone buildings, temples and mausoleums. Its sacred spaces had people in them, standing where the pedestal stood, carved by the men who lived below them.