Epizephyrian Locris, founded around 680 BCE in modern Calabria, hosted one of the Western world’s most important sanctuaries dedicated to Persephone.

Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian from Sicily, called Locri’s Persephoneion “the most illustrious sanctuary in Italy” in his Library of History (12.21).

Founded by Greek settlers from Greece who travelled to the Ionian coast of Italy to settle, Locri was once one of the most important Greek colonies in Southern Italy, and the goddess Persephone served as a protector of marriage, lineage, and the stability of the community.

Archeological Findings

Archaeologists first began excavating Locri Epizephyrii in 1889.

The Italian archaeologist Paolo Orsi led the early work there alongside German teams. Digs from 1908–1915 uncovered the Persephone sanctuary and other key sites.

Over 30,000 pinakes (painted votive tablets), numerous terracotta figurines of the goddess, and various bronze objects were uncovered at the sanctuary. These dedications would have been almost exclusively given by women to the goddess as offerings.

Nearly all of the items found were crafted locally from standardised moulds, and the fact that these were made of both inexpensive terracottas and finer bronze metals shows that there was participation from both ordinary worshippers and wealthier aristocratic women.

Unlike Demeter cults elsewhere, Locri’s sanctuary is unique to Italy because it centred its worship intensely on Persephone alone as its primary deity, rather than pairing her equally with her mother Demeter.

Below are three of the beautiful pinakes found at Locri depicting Persephone.

The Mystai

Ancient literary sources and archaeological evidence suggest that young women known as Mystai played a central role at the cult of Persephone.

Mystai, meaning “those initiated” or “the closed-eyed ones,” referred to initiates of ancient Greek mystery cults who underwent secret rites for spiritual enlightenment.

At Eleusis, this concept centred on Demeter and Persephone’s myth, and was open to all Greeks (men, women, slaves, barring murderers or barbarians). At Locri mystai were centered on Persephone as a marriage and childbirth protector, modelling the abduction myth as a bride’s terrifying yet empowering transition to matronhood.

The topography of the sanctuary intensified this experience. Set at the foot of a hill, the sanctuary was bounded by retaining walls that guided visitors and initiates along a narrow, shaded path toward the central space. This combination of constricted access, sloping ground, and shifting light would have made entry to the sanctuary feel like a controlled descent into the underworld.

Many pinakes show Persephone’s abduction, her wedding to Hades, and seated as a queen receiving offerings, but they also include images of women dressing for marriage, processing with torches, offering wreaths or libations, and moving in small groups in domestic or garden settings.

This mix suggests that Locrian women used the sanctuary to “map” their own life transitions such as betrothal, marriage, and entry into adult status onto the goddess’s story of departure, liminality, and return.

The dedication of a pinax by a young Mystai likely marked a concrete step in that process, asking Persephone to protect her through marriage, sexuality, and childbirth.​

The Smiling Goddess

While the National Archaeological Museum of Locri and the Archaeological Museum at Reggio Calabria have found thousands of interesting finds from the site, which are now on display for visitors, the most impressive of them all is sadly no longer in Italy, but in Berlin, Germany. 

This incredible piece, an enthroned statue of Persephone, was said to have been discovered near Locri by a farmer and smuggled out to Italy to be sold.

According to a witness testimony (a man who came forward in the 60’s to ease his guilt) the statue was found around 1905 during agricultural work in a vineyard owned by a guy called Vincenzo Scannapieco.

After its discovery, the sculpture was removed from the ground roughly using winches and ropes, and was not reported to the archaeological authorities. Instead, it was hidden in a nearby olive oil mill for years, while the owner looked for an opportunity to sell it.

Around 1911, the statue was secretly moved to the coast using a horse and cart and taken to the small port of Gioiosa Marina.

From there it was shipped by sea with a stopover at Taranto, Puglia, which later contributed to confusion over the statue’s true place of origin.

In later years the statue passed through the hands of Italian and foreign antiquities dealers, at one point being declared to customs as a “garden statue” to avoid the stricter controls and possible seizure applied to archaeological objects.

Eventually, the statue made it to Switzerland and was offered to representatives of the German state. In 1915, it was acquired for around one million marks and entered the Royal Museum in Berlin, where it was catalogued as an ‘enthroned goddess from Southern Italy’. It has remained in Berlin ever since.

Some scholars have attributed the statue to being of Pugliese origin, citing its stylistic similarities to Apulian sculpture and its brief documented stopover in Taranto. However, this theory is unlikely since in Puglia no comparable Persephone cult exists, and even early German scholars immediately identified Locrian traits in the statue back in 1915 when it arrived.

If you look at the pinakes found at the Persephoneion, they all feature strikingly consistent depictions of Persephone. This uniformity makes it difficult to insist that the statue came from Taranto…

Calabrian locals have called for the statue’s return to Locri from Berlin’s Altes Museum for decades, and view the statue as illegally excavated, and therefore stolen goods.

Germany maintains that the statue’s 1915 acquisition was fully legal under the laws and practices of the time, with clear provenance documentation showing it entered the art market through legitimate channels.

Calabrian authorities counter this, saying that the clandestine 1905 excavation and smuggling violated the (weakly enforced) Italian heritage protections of the time.

No formal bilateral negotiations are currently underway, though, meaning if you want to visit the statue, which was part of Locri for thousands of years, you will now need to travel all the way to Germany to see her in person.

While the archaeological park at Locri is largely overgrown with scrub and grasses that obscure parts of the ruins (like many historic sites in Italy), it is well worth a visit.

The Museo e Parco Archeologico Nazionale di Locri is located 5km north of the site and has a great collection of pinakes, pottery, and statues to view. Find out all you need to know here.