The ancient Roman pillars known as Las Incantadas embody Thessaloniki’s multicultural past, their disputed removal to France and their partial homecoming through replicas.
In 1864, French scholar Emmanuel Miller dismantled Las Incantadas in Thessaloniki, Greece, a Roman monument that had survived for centuries among the city’s ordinary houses. Its sculptured pillars left for France despite fierce local opposition from both Greek and Turkish as well as Jewish inhabitants. Known as the “Enchanted Ones,” they would eventually return in replica form, while the originals remained in the Louvre’s collection.
A Roman colonnade incorporated into a Jewish home in an Ottoman city, Las Incantadas belonged to several overlapping histories. The names attached to the sculptures preserve something of the communities that lived around them and understood them differently.
A Roman monument with eight mythological figures
The colonnade is generally dated to the late second or early third century AD, although its chronology remains debated. The Louvre’s catalog gives a broader range of approximately AD 150–230. Its original function is also uncertain: one interpretation connects it with a luxurious public bath complex south of Thessaloniki’s ancient agora, or civic center.
The monument had two levels, with columns below and sculptured pillars above. Each of the four surviving pillars taken to France carries a mythological figure on two opposing faces. Although often called the “Caryatids of Thessaloniki,” they include both male and female figures carved in high relief.
Nike and a Maenad occupy one pillar; Ariadne and one of the Dioscuri another. A third pairs Aura with Dionysus beside a panther. On the fourth, Ganymede appears with Zeus in the form of an eagle, opposite Leda with the swan. Together, they bring scenes of divine power, desire, and Dionysian imagery into the monument’s architecture.
The names Thessaloniki gave its “Enchanted Ones”
Greek-speaking residents knew the figures as the Eidola, or “Idols.” The Turkish name recorded as Suret Maleh is commonly rendered as “angel figures,” although scholars have questioned its interpretation. The name that endured internationally came from the city’s Sephardic Jewish community: Las Incantadas, in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language.
Folklore supplied an explanation for the figures. In one story, a Thracian king ordered a spell to punish his wife’s affair with Alexander the Great. Warned of the danger, Alexander stayed away; the queen and then her husband entered the enchanted passage and turned to stone. This was a legend attached to the ruins, not their history: the Roman monument dates centuries after Alexander.
By the 19th century, the colonnade stood within the courtyard of a house in the Jewish quarter of Rogos, near the Roman agora and present-day Egnatia Street. Its precise original footprint remains uncertain.
Travelers recorded the monument long before its removal. The engravings associated with James Stuart and Nicholas Revett preserve its appearance, while the city’s antiquities authority identifies a single surviving photograph of the standing structure. These images retain something that the detached sculptures cannot: the relationship between the ancient monument and the neighborhood around it.
How Las Incantadas left Thessaloniki
Miller, a French specialist in ancient manuscripts, obtained Ottoman permission to remove the monument in 1864. However, permission from the authorities did not mean acceptance by the people living around it. Thessaloniki’s antiquities authority describes resistance across the city’s communities.
The dismantling was destructive. Lacking adequate equipment, Miller broke large architectural elements that he could not take apart and transported what he could to France. The surviving pillars were no longer part of a standing colonnade but fragments of a dismantled building.
The Louvre records their arrival at the museum in 1865, a distinction from the removal the previous year. They are cataloged as Ma 1391–1394. All four current collection entries list them as “not on display”; the entries do not explain when or why their display status changed.
Will they ever return to Greece?
Las Incantadas have been described as Thessaloniki’s or Macedonia’s “Elgin Marbles.” The comparison expresses a demand for the return of sculptures removed under Ottoman rule. But researchers also emphasize another dimension: the monument’s place in the shared, multicultural history of the city, rather than solely its identity as displaced ancient art.
The demand has continued into European politics. On February 2, 2025, Greek European Parliament member (MEP) Emmanouil Fragkos submitted a written question urging the return of Las Incantadas. He argued that the sculptures should be seen in their geographical and historical setting. That intervention was a political appeal, not an agreement to return them.
In its response, the European Commission noted that the return mechanisms under Directive 2014/60/EU do not apply to cultural objects removed before January 1, 1993, including the 19th-century removal described in the question. That limitation concerns a particular European legal mechanism; it does not resolve the broader restitution debate.
A homecoming in replica form
A different kind of return became possible in 2015. Following conservation work and checks that the pillars could safely be molded, casts were produced at the Louvre. The agreement also provided for the molds to go to Greece as a symbolic French gift.
Supported by Thessaloniki’s municipality, the city’c Fair TIF-Helexpo, and local institutions, the replicas arrived in September 2015 and were initially exhibited at the Thessaloniki International Fair. Their permanent exhibition in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki’s entrance portico opened in September 2017.
Thessaloniki also retains an original piece of the monument: a fragment attributed to a fifth pillar, discovered during utility excavations on Rogoti Street in 1997 and placed in the archaeological museum. It preserves part of a winged female figure, possibly Nike.
The replicas restore the figures’ presence in the city, but not the monument itself. In Thessaloniki, visitors can encounter their forms again but the four ancient pillars removed in 1864 remain in the Louvre Museum collection. The homecoming is visible yet incomplete.
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