Kouros of Apollonas

The Kouros of Apollonas, also called the Colossus of Dionysus, is a 10.7 metre[1] tall unfinished statue of light grey Naxian marble with a weight of around 80 tonnes.

It is located in an ancient quarry near Apollonas [de], a small town in the northern part of Naxos, one of the Cycladic Islands in the Aegean Sea.

The statue is a kouros dating from Archaic period of Ancient Greece, around the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

Bondelmonte called it a "statue Apollonis" in the fifteenth century on account of the proximity of the sanctuary of Apollo.

The arms have been cut by the stonemasons as rudimentary rectangles and the shaping of the feet had been begun; they are located on a 50 cm high plinth.

It is clear however that the Kouros of Apollonas was to be a depiction of an older man with a beard and that its right arm would have been stretched out in front of it.

From the same marble quarry at Melanes came the roughly 9 metre high 25 ton Colossus of the Naxians, which was completed and set up on the island of Delos but is now in fragments.

So the sculptors never worked on a leg, arm or head individually, but always on the sculpture as a whole and thus the whole figure was at the same stage of completion at each moment.

In the centre, between the back of the kouros and the stone is a rectangular hole with a width of 40 cm, for the insertion of a wooden lifting beam.