Kerameikos Street
The Kerameikosstraße is the oldest and most important way of Kerameikos , a Demos and neighborhood of ancient Athens and an excavation site with an archaeological park in modern Athens .
The right bank of Eridanos already existed prehistoric times a route between the settlement on the Acropolis of Athens and a settlement west of it near the Cephissus where later the Academy of Athens was built. The road led from there to the Demos Thria in the Thriasic plain and then on to Boeotia . Initially, the whole street that led through the pottery district, the Demos Kerameikos , was named after him. After the city wall was erected, an inner and an outer Kerameikos was created outside the walls from the Dipylon to the entrance to the academy 1.5 kilometers away . Today only a small part of the Inner Kerameikos is preserved, the exact route of the Outer Kerameikos is not known. After the gate was erected, the Athenians expanded the outer part of the street into a wide boulevard, the name Akademiestrasse has been handed down to Philostratos of Athens . The inner part between Dipylon and Acropolis became the Panathenaic Way , named after the annual processions on the occasion of the Panathenaic Islands . In Himerius n. Chr. Also the name for the fourth century Dromos narrated that the use of the road for ritual torch relays alludes.
There is an unusually large number of ancient sources for the street, which is due to the importance of the street for various cults and festivals of the Athenians. The street was the scene of the annual funeral procession as part of the public state funeral for the fallen Athenian warriors in the Polyandrion , as a place of religious processions and as a place of agons and races. Especially since the reorganization of the Panathenaic Mountains in 566 BC. In BC the street was included in various ways, and there were some important altars on it. As of 522/21 BC Chr. Peisistratos had the road network reorganized and the roads to the surrounding area renewed, he created the twelve-gods altar on the agora as a central reference point, to which the Kerameikos street now also referred. His son Hipparchus had hermen built as mnemata on the street. Also since the time of Peisistratus there was a sanctuary for Dionysus Eleuterios , Dionysus the Liberator , on the road. Dionysus was considered the father of the hero Keramos , who was revered as the local hero and namesake of the Kerameikos. During the great Dionysia , the cult image of the god was first brought here from his sanctuary on the southern slope of the Acropolis during a night parade by torchlight ( pannychis ), then back again. In his description of the state graves , Pausanias lists the grave of the tyrannicide Harmodios and Aristogeiton on the street. On the northeastern edge of the street was the grave of the Athenians who died in the war ( Polyandrion ), where the city's fallen soldiers were buried once a year in a solemn ceremony at state expense. Pericles gave his famous funeral speech on Kerameikos Street. There were also regular funeral games and other memorial events for the fallen.
The road was expanded in several steps. The sequence of eight streets could be reconstructed. They were all earth roads, for the construction of which gravel was mixed with flour and tamped firmly. The first road, which was used from prehistoric times to archaic times, has not been archaeologically proven, but must be assumed for practical reasons, as there must have been a path between the Acropolis and the necropolis north of the Eridanos. The orientation will have been to the graves from the Sub-Mycenaean to the Archaic period. Second Street was built in the early fifth century. For the first time, the path was marked by steles on the edges. Two of the steles were found. The expansion into a boulevard took place in the late fifth century. The southwest edge of the road is still visible in the area today. 70 meters in front of the Dipylon, it reached a width of 39 meters. Around 350 BC A series of steles was set up to mark the boundary of the demo. In the 4th century BC It was the widest street in all of Greece. Due to floods and construction work on Proteichisma and Dipylon, in the late 4th century BC The street level of the outer Kerameikos increased several times. There are still many post holes from the early Hellenistic period on the edge of this fourth street, which originate from scaffolding that were built for stands for the various events. A fifth street was built shortly after Sulla conquered Athens in 86 BC. Created. The street was noticeably reduced in size. Under the south-western edge of the road was in the 1st century BC. A water line made of box pipes was laid to supply the workshops. In the northwest street area there was a sewer made of superimposed U-pipes from the same period. Sewer entrances were created at regular intervals for cleaning purposes. After a second edge wall was built in the 2nd century, the now sixth street was narrowed again. The vacated space was used, among other things, to plant new graves, the only Roman grave road in Athens and one of the few roads of this type in Greece at all. After the Herulian storm in 267, the street was narrowed again towards the end of the century. Solid curb stones delimited the solidly laid out street. As the deep wagon tracks that have been preserved show, it was heavily frequented, and the curbs were also very worn. For the eighth and last time the street was changed in the first half of the 6th century, again it mainly affected the route in front of the gate. The sewage system was renewed and a Christian necropolis was created.
So far, the road has only been explored in smaller sections, as large stretches of it are modernly built over. The research here is closely linked to the work of German archaeologists and building researchers in the Athens Department of the German Archaeological Institute . Between 1914 and 1916, Alfred Brueckner began to uncover a small area of the road on the southwestern edge of the State Grave Road, excavating the Lacedaemonian grave and a large part of the rotunda at the third horos, the two only carefully examined state graves to date. Kurt Gebauer and Heinz Johannes continued these excavations first in 1932 and then again from 1936 to 1942. A cross-section that Dieter Ohly had created in 1959/1960 was essential for research into the development history of the roads . This clarified the key points and the sequence of the various stages in the development of the road. In 1962, research was carried out in the area of the dipylon under construction researcher Gottfried Gruben . During the excavations from 1998 to 2001 and 2006, new knowledge was gained about the street in classical times, the canals and water pipes that were laid in the street space, as well as the route in front of the Dipylon from Roman times to late antiquity .
literature
- Jutta Stroszeck : The Kerameikos in Athens. History, buildings and monuments in the archaeological park. , Bibliopolis Verlag, Bad Langensalza 2014, ISBN 978-3-943741-04-9 , pp. 33-39.
Remarks
- ↑ Thucydides 2: 35-46
Coordinates: 37 ° 58 ′ 42 ″ N , 23 ° 43 ′ 7 ″ E