Jason with the Golden Fleece (Thorvaldsen) from the 3rd century BC depicts Jason removing the Golden Fleece from the sacred tree. Thorvaldsen's work was initially executed for the Copenhagen Academy to demonstrate his progress; a marble version was subsequently commissioned by Thomas Hope, a wealthy English art patron. When Hope's eventual heirs dispersed his collection at Deepdene, Surrey, in 1917, it was acquired by Copenhagen's Thorvaldsen Museum at auction. Considered to be Thorvaldsen's breakthrough work, the statue's theme stems from a drawing of "Jason and the Golden Fleece" by Asmus Jacob Carstens but the esthetic of the nude figure is also inspired by the Apollo Belvedere
Operation Golden Fleece Operation Golden Fleece The Operation Golden Fleece () was a non-combatant evacuation operation carried out by the Hellenic Navy in August 1993 to evacuate over 1,000 native Greeks from Georgia fleeing the War in Abkhazia to Greece. After World War II, ethnic Greeks of the Abkhaz ASSR were deported on Joseph Stalin's order in 1949-1950. They were allowed to return in the late 1950s, however their number never reached pre-deportation level. Most of the Greeks fled Abkhazia (mostly to Greece and Russia) during and after the 1992-1993 war so that their number dropped from 14,664 in 1989 to just 1,486