A life-size torso reveals Perperikon once had monumental statues

A life-size male torso carved from local stone has given archaeologists the first direct physical evidence that monumental statues once stood at Perperikon, the ancient rock city in Bulgaria’s eastern Rhodope Mountains. Excavators recovered the torso alongside a stone pedestal built to hold a large freestanding figure and a separate fragment that may depict a lion, all three pulled from the same trench in the site’s Southern Quarter after 26 years of continuous digging there. Team members date the pieces to the Late Roman and Late Antique periods, between the third and early sixth centuries AD.

Nothing this size had turned up at Perperikon before, despite more than two and a half decades of excavation across a site already famous for its rock-cut sanctuary and medieval fortress walls. A pedestal without a statue only proves something once stood there; a torso proves what that something looked like.

A pedestal, a torso and a possible lion from the Sacred Zone

The team led by Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov found the pieces in what excavators call the Sacred Zone, a section of Perperikon’s Southern Quarter already known for temples and mausoleums. According to Arkeonews’s report on the find, the pedestal was substantial enough to have supported a standing figure at roughly human scale, and the torso recovered nearby matches that scale directly rather than belonging to a smaller votive object of the kind Perperikon has produced in quantity over the years.

The third piece, a sculptural fragment the team believes may represent an animal, possibly a lion, is less certain in its identification than the torso or pedestal. Guardian-animal statuary was common at temple entrances across the Roman world, which is the working theory excavators are testing against the fragment’s remaining detail as cleaning and analysis continue. Weathering and centuries of soil pressure have blurred the edges enough that the team is not yet ready to commit to the lion identification in print, even as it shapes their current best guess about what originally flanked the pedestal.

Local stone, local craftsmen, dated to Late Antiquity

Ovcharov’s team determined the statues were carved from stone quarried near the site rather than imported marble, concluding they were produced by local craftsmen working in a Late Roman provincial tradition rather than shipped in from a workshop elsewhere in the empire. Ovcharov described the find as evidence that “Perperikon developed distinctive approaches to architecture and art rather than simply reproducing models found elsewhere,” a claim the locally sourced stone directly supports.

Placing the statues between the third and early sixth centuries AD situates them at the tail end of Perperikon’s life as an active Roman and Byzantine settlement, a period sandwiched between the site’s earlier existence as a Thracian sanctuary to Dionysus and its later role as a medieval fortress. Archaeologists have previously dated other structures at the site across a span running back roughly 7,000 years, from Bronze Age traces through a fortress with walls up to 2.8 meters thick; anchoring the statuary firmly within Late Antiquity narrows one more piece of that long timeline to a specific, datable window rather than leaving it as a rough guess spanning several centuries.

Twenty-six years into a city that keeps producing firsts

Ovcharov has directed excavations at Perperikon since systematic digging began there in 2000, building on smaller-scale work first done in 1931, and has separately described the site to Bulgarian National Radio as one of world significance, noting the site now draws more than 250,000 visitors a year. Ovcharov holds his doctorate from the National Archaeological Institute with Museum, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences body that functions, in its own description, as the national coordinator of field archaeology across the country.

Perperikon’s excavation history includes a run of firsts: a bronze Apollo statuette, a Thracian ceremonial sword, and in 2005 a church pulpit researchers believe is the earliest one found anywhere in Bulgaria, alongside Linear A script fragments from around 1500 BC that German scholars at Heidelberg University later confirmed. Even against that record, project members are describing the newly found torso as the first proof of monumental statuary at a site that has produced almost everything else Roman and Thracian archaeology has to offer.

Ovcharov’s team expects the current excavation season, running nearly four months in 2026, to yield final urban-planning results for the Southern Quarter by October, work that could tie the statue find to a specific building or public square rather than leaving it as an isolated cluster of stone. Roughly 90 percent of the site’s acropolis has already been cleared in the search for its central square, according to Ovcharov’s own account of the dig’s progress, which is part of why a find this size, sitting untouched until now, has drawn attention even among archaeologists used to Perperikon producing something new almost every season.

Whatever the October results add, the torso already answers a question the site’s temples and mausoleums had left open for 26 years: whether anyone at Perperikon ever built a statue large enough for a person to stand in front of and recognize a face.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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