They landed on an island in the Kyklades.
I marvel at those figures enigmatic figures. I have marveled at them for thirty years.
Had Eric van Daeniken known of them, he would surely have (mis)construed them as aliens. (Though I admit that they do look a little bit like Thor from Star Gate.) The first time I saw one of these was in ‘The Magus’ in the 1970s. Though only on film, the single figure seemed so, well, remarkable, alien even. Next, I saw a display of several of them face-to-face at the Grand Palace in Paris in 1980. Again a lasting impression. Finally, a display from the Benaki Museum at the Power House Museum in Sydney had one which I examined (pressed my nose to the glass) with care a few years ago.
The prospect of a museum devoted to this work was a wonderful discovery when I pored over guidebooks, maps, and Google_Earth. It went on The Plan in the red folder.
The link is http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/1/eh151.jsp?obj_id=3520
The Museum has a wealth of works from the Kyklades in the Nicholas Goulandris Foundation Collection and other material as well.
Well worth a visit, even though part of it was closed when we were there. It has a nice cafe courtyard. Its shop attracted our Visas. I got small figure: a head.
From the Museum I learned that obsidian from the Kyklades, including particularly Melos, had been important for several thousand years before the time of Pericles, and that it was also widely distributed. However, by the Age of Pericles Bronze was the tool and weapon of choice, and obsidian was no longer so important.
The Kyklades Museum is on a side street off Evangelismos Street along museum row with the Benaki, the Byzantine and Christian, and the War Museums.
We went back a second time to see a special exhibit on The Greek, that is, El Greco to you. We were not alone; when arrived the line was spilling out into the street and included at least one school group, maybe ten school groups to judge by the noise. We did not want to spend our precious time in Athens standing in line so we went to another task. Dedicated, yep, that is us.