Excavating the Theatre

The largest of Ugolini’s excavations at Butrint was the clearance of the theatre, part of the shrine of Asclepius, between 1928 and 1931. When Ugolini began working here there were merely the remains of a number of walls projecting above the surface, and his first assumption was that the remains belonged to a basilica. Only in 1929, when the seats of the cavea were discovered, did the true identity of the structure become clear.

Equipped with water pumps, a permanent team of 20 labourers who drained the trenches, and a light railway line to carry away the soil the excavations proceeded at a staggering pace. The excavation was fuelled by the discovery in 1928 of a group of marble statues and heads. These were suggestively found just in front of the scaenae frons, aligned as if they had fallen direct from the niches of the stage building. Indeed, that was how the Italian team reconstructed them, and how essentially they have continued to be viewed. A more probable explanation is that they were assembled in the theatre in the 4th-5th centuries in anticipation of being reworked or broken up.

The marble finds included two cuirassed statues, and the female figures as well as portraits of the Roman emperor Augustus, his wife Livia and his general Agrippa. However, by far the most famous was to be the so-called Goddess of Butrint. Ugolini, persuaded by the deity’s effeminate features, reconstructed it as belonging to one of the female statues found in the theatre, and the figure quickly became the symbol of the excavations. Ugolini describes the discovery of the head thus:

During the excavation of the theatre a workman announced from his section that there was ‘something rounded.’ I leapt into the trench convinced that it was a piece of sculpture and replaced him in the delicate task. It really was a head, and one that appeared to have a perfect profile! I washed the sculpture continuously, the better to see it during the delicate task of extraction and revealed a beautiful head whose fine and delicate marble contrasted with the lead-coloured surrounding mud. “It even has a nose! It even has a nose!” cried one of the Albanians. Our anxious experience was not a delusion, as it was one of the crowning moments of our work: the head of the ‘Goddess of Butrint.’

The head, in fact, depicts the god Apollo, the patron deity of the Emperor Augustus – to whose patronage of Butrint the presence of the statue should be linked.

 

• The Italian Archaeological Mission
• Excavating the Theatre
• Ugolini and Virgil
• Archeological modernity
• Leon Rey: The French interests at Apollonia

The ‘Goddess of Butrint’
The marble head not only became a symbol of the excavations but soon acquired a life of its own. The most persistent story was that the Italian Archaeological Mission sought to smuggle it to Italy but were discovered by a zealous customs officer. To avoid a major diplomatic incident the Albanian King Zog graciously donated the head to Mussolini. The head remained in Italy until 1982 when it was returned to Tirana in a gesture of normalisation between the two countries. Such was its status that it became the subject of a novel by Teodor Laço, Korba Mbi Mermere (Blackbirds over the Marbles) of 1987.
It is now the symbol of numerous hotels in Saranda, as well as of the Saranda football team, Butrint United.