A river runs through it

Athens’ ancient graveyard

Posted with special permission from The Athens News

Why is it that of my first visit to the Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery of Athens at the bottom of Ermou Street, my most vivid memory concerns hopping frogs? Our guide must have been telling the group fascinating details about the site, pointing out landmarks and bringing the place of the dead back to life, but her commentary has left no trace in my mind. Instead, it has been supplanted by a vision of totally unexpected yellow-and-green spotted creatures croaking by the side of a stream.

I suppose it is a measure of how thirsty we Athenians are for nature that the presence of any wildlife other than pigeons, alleycats and mangy dogs can be more exciting than a historic monument. For Athens holds the dubious honor of having the lowest ratio of green to cement of any major European city. And while Paris, Rome, London, Prague, Budapest and a host of other capitals have romantic rivers adding color, life and diversity to their city-scapes, the rivers of Athens – all three of them – have been boxed into concrete channels and buried almost totally out of sight. The Lissos and Kiphissos suffered this fate in the mid 20th century; the Eridanos, which flowed through the center of Athens, was covered over by the Romans, if not earlier.

And yet it is the Eridanos that makes the Kerameikos more than just an interesting collection of tombs and historic walls. Although it probably was never more than a seasonal torrent, swollen by winter rains and virtually dry in August, its muddy banks were a wonderful source of clay. Which brings us to a chicken-and-egg story: Did the area become the potters’ district because this was where the cemetery was located (from the 12th century BC on) or did the cemetery become established there because of the proximity of the potters? Potters were as essential to funerals as morticians are today, since urns were required for grave offerings and as containers for ashes. Unlike the Orthodox Church, the ancients did not consider cremation anathema.
In any case, the district took its name from Keramos, a son of Dionysos and Ariadne and patron of the potters (kerameis). Eridanos, on the other hand, was thought to be a minor god, one of the three thousand son-rivers from the union of Oceanos and Tethys, which also resulted in three thousand daughters, the Oceanids. With its source at the foot of Lycabettus, the Eridanos flowed through what is now Syntagma Square; you can see a small section of the petrified bed bristling with shards and behind glass on exhibit in the Metro station. From there its course ran under Philellinon, Othonos and Mitropoleos streets, down Adrianou (where a bit of ancient channel lies exposed) and alongside the tracks at Monastiraki. Then it bends to the northwest and enters the cemetery enclosure, where it surfaces for a few hundred meters before entering another underground channel and eventually joining up with the cemented bed of the Kiphissos, which parallels Pireos Street.

Granted, this slow-moving trickle is not much to look at. But the fact that it exists at all is remarkable and reflects the symbiosis of archaeology and ecology. Few laws preserve ecosystems that occupy prime real estate in the middle of a burgeoning city, but they do protect ancient monuments and therefore, inadvertently, some vestiges of nature manage to survive in these sites, even when surrounded by heavy traffic and noxious smog.

A booklet prepared by the Ministry of Culture in 2000 catalogues these vestiges, reporting that the Kerameikos is home to fifteen species of birds and animals, one fish – a miniscule creature called the mosquito fish that can cope with the river’s shrinking waters – and 188 plant species within its 40,000 square meters. This does not mean that you will see anything more exotic than a tortoise or a caper bush, but I find comfort in the possibility that hedgehogs may be napping in a shady burrow or that the Callas-like trills coming from the branches of a Jerusalem thorn tree are produced by a Sardinian warbler. It is also reassuring that some branch of the government actually cared enough to conduct this census and publish the information in such an attractively produced, impeccably translated edition. What a welcome diversion from the Great Works in Progress that seem to gobble more public resources.

Although the Kerameikos is a park nowadays, in ancient times it was right in the thick of the city. It formed a continuation of the Agora, something that is hard for us to envisage with all the commotion in Emou Street and Monastiraki separating the two sites today. It was also the western gateway to Athens and where the city’s two main roads – the Lera Odos (Sacred Way) and Panathenaic Way – met. Between the two gates stood a magnificent building, the Pompeion, from which processions set off for Eleusis and the Panathenaic festival. I suppose it would be disrespectful to compare it to Macy’s in New York (another parade starting point), but not entirely inappropriate. The Dromos, or The Street, which is what the Panathenaic Way was called outside the Kermeikos, was in fact Athens’ main shopping arcade. The Dromos connected the Agora with the Academy and was lined with tombs and memorials to celebrated Athenians including Pericles and soldiers fallen in battle (with the exception of the heroes of Marathon). In other words, there seems to have been no thought of sequestering the dead, no fear that the sight of graves could put a damper on a shopping spree.

After Themistocles had walls erected around Athens the moment the Persians fled – it might have been too much to expect the fleet, its wood walls, to hold fast a second time – the Kerameikos was divided in two sections, the Outer and Inner. Here two of the wall’s fifteen gates were opened, the Dipylon with its double portals designed to entrap invaders, and the Sacred. The Sacred Gate also had two openings, one for the road, the other for the river. You can still see the gates, a tower and a portion of wall near the southeastern border of the site. Rising to 3 or 4 meters, it is hardly as imposing as the original; at 15 meters high and 4 meters wide, the walls offered real security for about four hundred years until Sulla bombarded the Dipylon Gate into rubble in 86 BC.

For a view of the Kerameikos as a whole, go to the hill, an ancient grave tumuls, opposite the entrance, where there is a map highlighting the various landmarks and monuments. The gates, the Pompeion and the Eridanos are to the right, whereas most of the tombs are to the left. They are far less lavish and flamboyant than the 19th century mausoleums in Athens’ First Cemetery, and far less crowded. They come in several styles: steles of various degrees of plainness, some with relief portrayals of the decreased; naiskoi, where the doleful moment is set in a miniature temple; aediculae, where the naiskos is but a frame for a relief or a full sculpture; marble urns; and, most common, the kioniskos, a slender, undecorated column. There is a whole forest of the latter under the pine trees next to the museum.

In the cemetery’s first four centuries the ashes of the dead were placed in urns and then buried, but by the late 8th century BC cremation occurred in the grave itself and urns containing offers were laid alongside in separate, shallower pits. Gradually markers began to appear, simply inscribed initially, then surmounted with large clay vessels: drinking cups in the case of men (how typical!), two-handled pitchers for married women and singe-handled pitches for virgins. Solon’s strict rules restrained the decoration of funerary monuments in the 6th century BC, but it seems that the notion of a tombstone as a measure of social prestige as well as sorrow lies deep within us. By the next century prosperous mourners were commissioning the best sculptors to design ever more ostentatious tombs. We are in awe of steles like the woman with her jewelry box, the Dexileos memorial of a mounted warrior spearing a supine foe, and the sublime statue of a bull that commemorates Dionysos of Kollytos, which are some of the cemetery’s most celebrated masterpieces. None post-date the late 4th century BC. That was when the current ruler of Athens, Dimitrios of Phaleron, decided the competition was getting out of control, consuming scandalous amounts of money, and put a stop to it. He decreed that “no tomb shall be built with more elaboration than can be effected by three men in ten days” and that steles should be unadorned and no more than five feet tall. The grave as an art form went out of fashion. Even the potters were reduced to making household goods, since funerary urns were no longer permitted.

Luckily a lot has survived from the pre-puritan period and you can spend hours wandering among the tombs, pondering art and death, or simply enjoying the shade, spring smells and birdsong in this tranquil park. The Oberlander Museum near the entrance, named after its German-American benefactor, contains the originals of some of the most valuable tombstones, dozens of exquisite funerary urns and vases and, most poignantly, many toys that were buried with children: a clay horse on wheels, loaded with four amphorae; birds with elephant feet; a young girl’s bracelet and earrings; even a set of knucklebones for playing jacks. The museum needs a facelift, but the exhibits rise above their surroundings.

After I pored over them, I went back to the Eridanos. Its greeny waters were speckled with black tadpoles. Soon they’ll be hopping about the banks. But I have since learned, thanks to the Ministry of Culture’s wonderful little book, that they are not frogs, but green toads, Bufo virdis.