Abdera, Thrace
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Date: 2021-12-05

Abdera, Thrace, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2685 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Municipalities_of_Eastern_Macedonia_and_Thrace
#Populated_places_in_Xanthi_(regional_unit)
#Ionian_colonies_in_Thrace
#Ancient_Greek_cities
#Members_of_the_Delian_League
#Populated_places_established_in_the_7th_century_BC
#Greek_city-states
#Populated_places_in_ancient_Thrace
#Phoenician_colonies_in_Greece
Abdera （Greek: Άβδηρα） is a municipality in the Xanthi regional unit of Thrace, Greece.
In classical antiquity, it was a major Greek polis on the Thracian coast.
The ancient polis is to be distinguished from the municipality, which was named in its honor.
The polis lay 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos River, almost directly opposite the island of Thasos.
It was a colony placed in previously unsettled Thracian territory, not then a part of Hellas, during the age of Greek colonization.
The city that developed from it became of major importance in ancient Greece.
After the 4th century AD it declined, contracted to its acropolis, and was abandoned, never to be reoccupied except by archaeologists.
Meanwhile, life went on as the changing population settled in other communities in the region.
One named Polystylus changed its name to Abdera.
In 2011 the municipality of Abdera was synoecized from three previous municipalities comprising a number of modern settlements.
The ancient site remains in it as a ruin.
The municipality of Abdera has 19,005 inhabitants （2011）.
The seat of the municipality is the town Genisea.
The name Abdera is of Phoenician origin and was shared in antiquity by Abdera, Spain and a town near Carthage in North Africa.
It was variously Hellenized as Ἄβδηρα （Ábdēra）, Αὔδηρα （Aúdēra）, Ἄβδαρα （Ábdara）, Ἄβδηρον （Ábdēron）, and Ἄβδηρος （Ábdēros）, before being Latinized as Abdera.
Greek legend attributed the name to an eponymous Abderus who fell nearby and was memorialized by Hercules's founding of a city at the location.
The present-day town is written Avdir...