History and Archaeology Museum

The country's best collection of Greek and Roman antiquities from the Black Sea coast

The Muzeul de Istorie Națională și Arheologie sits on Piața Ovidiu in the old town, occupying the former city hall — a Greek-revival building with a long front portico. It holds the country's most important collection of antiquities from the Greek, Hellenistic and Roman periods on the Black Sea coast, drawn from the long history of Tomis and the surrounding sites of Dobruja.

The collection runs from prehistoric ceramics through Greek black-figure vases, Roman portraits, gravestones, mosaics and the famous Glykon statue. Allow at least two hours. The basement extension houses the Roman Mosaic Edifice (Edificiul Roman cu Mozaic) — a vast 3rd-century commercial complex with a mosaic floor of more than 700 square metres, the best-preserved of its kind in eastern Europe.

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The museum's most celebrated object is the **Glykon serpent**, a coiled marble statue of a syncretic Greek-Roman snake god with a human face, dredged from the seabed in 1962. Lucian of Samosata wrote a satirical biography of the cult in the 2nd century; the Constanța Glykon is the most complete surviving cult statue and one of the strangest objects in any Romanian museum.