KERAMEIKOSATHENST

he famous Deme of Kerameis, Kerameikos, extended
over the small Eridanos River valley in the northwestern
fringe of ancient Athens, in Thucydides’ “most beautifulsuburb”. Until the Persian Wars, the Eridanos valley wasa large, quiet cemetery containing some humble pottery
workshops that have left no traces.After the building of thewall and its two most important gates – the Sacred Gateand the Dipylon – at this location, the city was secured
and acquired an imposing front towards the West, urban
planning components with impressive structures, and its
most formal cemetery.
Of all the surviving sections of the walls of ancient Athensin the modern city visitors can admire the best preserved
and most instructive segment of the fortifications at thearchaeological site of the Kerameikos (n. 1-2).The first phaseof the wall section preserved in the Kerameikos dates to 478
BC, after the battle of Plataea and the Persian retreat frommainland Greece, when Themistocles, a farsighted generaland talented politician, pressed the Athenians to quickly
fortify their city in haste. According to Thucydides, “theAthenians walled their city in a short time (one year) with anew wall that included and expanded the city in all directions”(Thuc. 1.93.2, translation: E.Venizelos). Many grave stelai fromtombs and sculptured stones were used in its construction,
which are now exhibited in the small Kerameikos Museum,as well as in the National Archaeological Museum.With therebuilding of the greater Themistoclean wall, which ran to alength of 43 stades (i.e. 6,450 m. with approximately 200 m.
preserved in Kerameikos), the previously unified deme ofKerameis, which had lain outside the walls, was separated
into two, the “Inner” and the “Outer” Kerameikos, the cityproper (the asty) and the extramural, rural land surrounding
it. The Athenians repaired, reinforced and occasionallyrebuilt these walls, along the same line of defense for about
a millennium, until the reign of the emperor Justinian (6thc. AD).
Along the section of the wall that traverses Kerameikos ina general northeast-southwest direction opened two gates:
the Thriasian Gates or Dipylon (n. 3) and the Sacred Gate(n. 4). Both functional and religious reasons determined thelocation of these two gates. Long before the building of
the Themistoclean wall, the Panathenaic and the “Iakchos”(headed for Eleusis) procession, were organized in this area;
the former began from the area of the later Dipylon, thelatter from that of the Sacred Gate and followed the courseof ancient roads that were in use for centuries, long beforethe construction of the wall: Dromos or Kerameikos street, which led fromthe Thriasian gates to the suburb of Akademeia, the deme of Eleusis – Thria– which also gave its name to the gate, the Thriasian Plain, and beyond thisto the Peloponnese, and the Sacred or Eleusinian Way, heading for Eleusis.
These two roads were thus named from the Classical period on.
The Sacred Way was a processional road in operation from at least the 8thcentury BC. Parallel to its course flowed the small river Eridanos, and passed
through the Sacred Gate, which was planned and constructed accordingly, so
as to accommodate pedestrians, riders, wheeled vehicles and the river. The
entire length of the Sacred Way was flanked by funerary monuments andclusters of graves in roadside burial family plots (periboloi) dating from theearly Archaic down to the Roman period, and along its route there have also
been identified superimposed sections of ancient road pavements, workshops,bridges, and sanctuaries. Three luxurious private residences were built in theClassical period in the Inner Kerameikos, immediately next to the city wall, andremained in use for centuries, undergoing modifications as the years passed (n.
5). Right before the Archaic precinct of the Tritopatreion (n. 6), the Sacred Way
forked, and its southern branch, the so-called “Street of the Tombs”, led tothe harbor of Mounichia in Piraeus. It was so called because some of the mostbeautiful grave monuments in the whole of the archaeological site crowned
familial burial plots of the ripe and the late Classical period, along its edges.
The Dipylon (“double gate, double entrance”), in the northernmost section of
the wall within the Kerameikos, was the largest gate in the ancient world, witha total area of 1,800 square meters and the most monumental entranceway
in the city. The enormous court of the Dipylon and the Dromos in front of it
offered ample room for crowds to assemble on official occasions: at the yearlyceremonies in honor of the dead, at contests, or for the delivery of funeraryorations in honor of those fallen in war and being buried in the Demosion Sema.
Inside the city proper (the asty), this road was known as the “Panathenaic Way”,
since it was there – at the starting-point for the festival of the Great Panathenaea– that the crowds gathered to assemble the Panathenaic procession, before
the construction of the Pompeion in the end of the 5th c. BC.A large fountainin contact with the inner (city) side of the Dipylon refreshed wayfarers andtheir animals and supplied part of the city with water (n. 7).
Shortly after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants (403 BC) and before Conon’srenovation of the walls (394 BC), an oblong, public building – the Pompeion –was built, squeezed into the empty space between the Dipylon and the Sacred
Gate (n. 8). It presented the layout of an ancient gymnasium and featured amonumental propylon, peristyle inner court, and a series of square banquet
rooms on its west and north sides. As its name suggests, it was built to serve
the needs of the festival of the Great Panathenaea, every fourth year in midAugust.The building was almost entirely destroyed by the Romans under Sulla(86 BC) and replaced by a new two-storey structure called by modern research
the “Building of the Warehouses”, which was again completely destroyed in
the Herulian invasion (AD 267), to be later substituted by two parallel facing
stoas with a shared entrance.
The area outside the city walls known as the “suburb” is occupied by publicbuildings, sanctuaries and workshops, but above all by the Classical necropolis.

During the Archaic period, large tumuli signaled the burial spots of aristocraticclans (n. 9), while some of these earth mounds also remained in use during
the ensuing period of Democracy. In the 5th and mostly in the 4th c. BC,
familial burial plots extend neatly across the fringes of major thoroughfares,
each with its own funerary monuments – veritable masterpieces in marble –that echoed the ideal figures and feats of eminent men and women of Athens,
like for example the young knight Dexileos or the maiden Hegeso (n. 10-12),
but also of foreigners, like for example Agathon and his family from Herakleia
in Pontus (in the Black Sea) or Philoxenos from Messene et al. An oblong burial
enclosure built in ashlar masonry on the southern rim of the Dromos, hasbeen identified with the Tomb of the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) who werekilled in 403 BC, at Piraeus, in a battle against the Athenian Democrats, led byThrasyboulos (n. 13).The dead were buried according to Xenophon’s Hellenica(2.4.33) “before the gates of Athens in the Kerameikos”. Further to the West,half-buried beneath today’s Piraeus Street, beside a marble boundary stone,
is one of the most imposing of the cemetery’s funerary plots, conventionallycalled the “funerary building at the third boundary stone” and dating to theend of the 5th c. BC. Beneath the contemporary city and namely under themodern streets Piraeus, Salaminos, Plataion and Leonidou extended the public
cemetery for the distinguished Athenians who had lost their lives in war for
their homeland, the so-called Demosion Sema (public cemetery), Polyandreion(common grave), Mnema (tomb monument). The tombs of Pericles, Chabrias,Phormio, Solon, Kleisthenes and of the Tyrannicides were also located there(Pausanias 1.29).
Adjacent to the Tomb of the Lacedaemonians, lies the circular bath house(balneum) of the mid-5th c. BC (n. 14) that is mentioned by Aristophanes in
the Knights and by the orator Isaeus. To the East of the bath house survives atelling example of a potter’s firing kiln of the Hellenistic period and close tothat a small temple of the 4th c. BC, perhaps connected with the worship of
the goddess Athena.

At the entrance to the Sacred Gate in front of its southwest tower, a small
sacred precinct with a marble altar on a marble base had been founded in the
5th c. BC; according to some scholars it is related to the worship of Demeter.
Some distance to the West stood a triangular-shaped sacred precinct dedicatedto an as-yet unidentified deity. Right at the junction between the Sacred Way
and the “Street of the Tombs” was the so-called Tritopatreion (n. 6), an openair, sacred precinct founded in the 6th c. BC for the worship of the Tritopatοres.
North of the Museum, on the terrace extending below the densely arranged
funerary columellae that were used as plain tomb markers after the edict ofDemetrius of Phaleron (317-307 BC) against the extravagance of funerary art
was put into effect,extends a temenos identified by earlier research as a sanctuaryof Hecate. However, new research shedding light on the matter, confirms that
it was actually dedicated to Artemis Soteira as well as her brother Apollo(n. 15). This venue was in fact the sole known oracle of the god in Athens, assuggested by an invocation to Apollo by the epithet “Paian“, which was foundinscribed repeatedly all over clay tiles layering the interior of a well that wassealed under an inverted lekythos-“omphalos”, inside the temenos.
The earliest Kerameikos excavations began in the spring of 1863 but weresystematically undertaken by the Archaeological Society from 1870 until 1913,
when they passed on to the German Archaeological Institute, still directing
them to this day. The early finds of these excavations are exhibited in theNational Archaeological Museum; however in 1938 a dedicated small Museum
was inaugurated on the site (n. 16), exhibiting since then some of the mostinfluential finds of the excavations, arranged and presented in neat chronologicalorder.

The “L“ shaped portico in front of the Museum as well as the north side of theMuseum house funerary monuments, primarily of the 4th c. BC, the first sectionof the Museum and the atrium house works of sculpture from the Archaic
and the Classical times and the three remaining oblong corridors framing
the atrium, house grave goods from the Prehistoric period to Late Antiquity.
Finds from the excavation of the eventually abandoned Kerameikos Metrostation at the junction between Piraeus Street and Hiera Odos are displayed

in showcase n. 10, the most remarkable being the remains from the mass burialof the Athenians who were exterminated by the lethal plague that hit the cityin the summer of 430-429 BC. The last showcase n. 15 comprises artifactsof everyday private and public life in ancient Athens, mainly from the privatehouses south of the Sacred Gate (n. 5). Here one may note some ostracism
sherds recording the names of prominent Athenian citizens who fell victim to
the ostracism procedure in the course of the 5th c. BC. These belong to onlya small fraction of almost 9,500 similar sherds, of which many were dumped in
front of the proteichisma. Finally, some lead tablets bearing information about
the Athenian cavalry of the Hellenistic times that were rejected in a well near
Dipylon are also exhibited in this showcase and are of particular interest.

SALAETPIR

EETTRS S OADRNOSSUAEMIETRIAAY IADATR1311499121126109ID
SA ANOCRED SW
AYER

1593781ET

4516
ΕRMOU STREET

1. Wall
2. Proteichisma
3. Dipylon
4. Sacred Gate
5. Private residences
6. Tritopatreion
7. Fountain
8. Pompeion
9. Large Tumuli
10. Tomb of Dexileos
11. Marble bull of Dionysios
from Kollytos
12. Stele of Hegeso

ION

ETRSIDLME

13. Tomb of the Lacedaemonians
14. Circular bath house
15. Sanctuary of Hecate –oracle of Apollo
16. Museum

OPERATING RULES
Please be informed that the following is strictly prohibited:(Law 3028/2002 and Official Government Gazette 88/B/23.1.2004)• to collect, remove or damage any kind of object, including ancient and contemporary
works of art as well as any natural item,• to consume food or beverages,• to smoke,• to produce litter of any kind,• to behave, dress or act in a way not compatible with the nature of the archaeologicalsite/museum,• entrance to people under the influence of substances (intoxicants, narcotics, etc.),• entrance to pets, except for dogs accompanying people with disabilities,• entrance to all vehicles, except for emergency vehicles and those used for conducting
archaeological works.
Furthermore, visitors and guides are kindly requested:• to comply with the instructions and indications of the security guards,• to follow the signs, walk along marked routes and avoid entering restricted areas,• not to touch any work of art,
• to be very careful whilst being near areas of high risk or areas where works are inprogress.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILMING(Official Government Gazette 1138/Β/10.04.2012, 3046/Β/30.12.2011 and 648/Β/07.03.2012)• Photography and filming with professional cameras as well as aerial photography
and filming, with or without human presence, are allowed only after a special permit
has been issued and fees have been paid.
• Photography and filming with amateur cameras are permitted for free unless they
are to be used for commercial purposes.
• Photography with the use of supplementary lighting systems inside a museum is notallowed, unless permission is granted.
Non-compliance with the above rules can lead to the evictionof recalcitrant visitors.
The archaeological site is partially accessible to visitors with disabilities using awheelchair, with the assistance of an escort.The Museum is fully accessible.

KERAMEIKOSATHENSi 148 Ermou Str., 105 53 Athens

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