Two Bulgarian museums have been invited to show items at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: the Regional History Museum in Burgas and the Municipal Cultural Centre in Sozopol. Two stone sculptures will go to the US, a relief of the goddess Cybele and a kouros from the Atia peninsula.

The kouros is a statue of a young man, dating from the 6th to the early 5th century BC. No older marble statue is held in a Bulgarian museum today.

The Cybele relief dates from the first half of the 5th century BC. It was found in the sea near the port of Sozopol.

Both works will be part of the show "Across the Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity Beyond Ancient Greece". It features 180 objects from the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea coast, western Asia Minor, North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia and the Italian peninsula.

The show looks at works made when the ancient Greeks came into contact with near and distant cultures. They include images of foreigners and of mythical heroes set in lands far from the Greek world. Images of mythological, legendary and "historical" non-Greeks show how Greek art told peoples apart.

The ancient Greeks were curious about foreign cultures. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC their civilisation was on the rise, their seafaring improved and their trade reached ever further. They met many tribes and states with their own cultures. The influence ran both ways: the Greeks shaped other societies and also took things from them.

The exhibition opens on December 14, 2026, and runs until April 11, 2027.