Greece Archaeological Tours

Greece archaeological tours are trips across the country that centre on its ancient ruins, sanctuaries and museums. The page starts with the Tunnel of Eupalinos on Samos and with Olynthus. Abdera, Poliochne, the Heraion of Samos and Mount Lykaion come next. Famous excavations and finds lead into four short answers at the end. Related reading sits on the classical Greece tour, Mycenae tours and Olympia tours pages. More trips wait among the Greece tours.

Bookings made through the GetYourGuide widgets on this page earn Classical Greece Tours a commission, at no extra cost to the traveller.

What are Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours are trips through a country with a long record of the past. Greek archaeology covers artificial remains, landscapes and the remains of buildings. Artificial remains are things that people made. It also covers biofacts, which are artefacts from once-living things.

The region’s story began roughly 2.5 to 1.5 million years ago. At that point, the first members of the genus Homo reached Eurasia. A genus groups together species that are closely related. Homo is the genus that holds humans. For Greece archaeological tours, Eurasia means Europe and Asia joined as one landmass.

The Neolithic period ran from 6500 to 3000 BC. Neolithic means of the New Stone Age. In this period farming began, and livestock became domesticated, or tamed for human use. Remains of its farming villages survive as tells that stand out from the landscape. A tell is a mound of mudbrick once used to build houses.

Diggers have explored around 120 sites across Thessaly, and tells make up the bulk of them. Each tell grew as people built new houses over the remains of older ones. In Greece archaeological tours, the Iron Age began later, in 1100 BC. It also goes by the name Dark Age of Greek history.

• Pottery phases: Iron Age pottery falls into five phases, starting with Submycenaean, the style after Mycenaean times.
• Alphabet: Greeks adopted Phoenician letters and built the first true phonetic alphabet, with letters for sounds.
• Classical age: Art, religion and war dominate Classical archaeology, which covers 510 BC to 323 BC.

For Greece archaeological tours, black-figure and red-figure methods ran side by side until the fifth century BC. After that, red-figure pottery came into wider use. In red-figure work, the figures keep the colour of the bare clay. Black paint fills the background around them.

Why does the Tunnel of Eupalinos matter to Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours share Samos with the Tunnel of Eupalinos, cut through rock from both ends. It was the first of its kind set out with geometry. Geometry is the branch of mathematics that deals with lines, angles and shapes.

Its supply started at an inland spring, about 52 metres above sea level. Heights like this are counted upward from the average level of the sea. The spring discharges about 400 cubic metres of water per day. A cubic metre is the space inside a cube one metre long on each side.

Fifteen big stone pillars carry a roof made of heavy stone slabs over the reservoir. A reservoir is a large store of water. For Greece archaeological tours, the north channel from the spring runs 890 metres to the tunnel mouth. Yet the straight-line distance between those two points is only 370 metres.

A separate channel had to be cut below the east half of the main tunnel. Its task was to carry the water itself. Within Greece archaeological tours, that lower channel grows deeper along its course. It lies 4 metres deep at the north end and 8.5 metres deep at the south end.

• Pipe: Each fired-clay, or terracotta, pipe section measured 72 centimetres long and 26 centimetres across.
• Meeting point: The two halves join at a dog-leg, or sharp bend, in the centre of the mountain.
• Rediscovery: In 1853 the French archaeologist Victor Guérin located the spring that supplies the tunnel.

For Greece archaeological tours, Ulf Jantzen carried out the full excavation from 1971 to 1973. He cleared the whole length of the tunnel. By then it had filled with silt. Silt is fine mud and sand that water carries and drops.

What did Olynthus leave behind for Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours unfold in a land that holds Olynthus, an ancient city in present-day Chalcidice. Olynthus acted as the leading city of the Chalcidian League from the league’s beginning. Olynthus kept that role until the city was destroyed.

A Neolithic settlement at Olynthus was founded in the fourth millennium BCE. One millennium equals ten centuries. The label BCE marks years counted backward before the Common Era. Its people lived as a farming society. They grew crops and kept domestic animals, which are animals tamed to live alongside people.

After the Neolithic village was abandoned, Olynthus was settled again in the seventh century BC. For Greece archaeological tours, Delian League lists record just 2 talents from Olynthus in 438 BCE. Scione, a neighbouring city, gave 15 talents that year. A talent was a large unit of silver. So Olynthus ranked below other Chalcidian cities in size then.

Each city block on the North Hill held ten houses. They stood in two rows of five, with an alley between the rows. Neighbouring houses shared their walls with each other. In Greece archaeological tours, signs of a second storey mark a large number of Olynthus houses. A storey is one level or floor of a building.

• Wrong place: William Leake once placed Olynthus at Agios Mamas, seven kilometres south of the real site.
• Reports: David Moore Robinson published the results of his digs in fourteen volumes.
• Harbour: The digs uncovered more than five hectares of the city and part of Mecyberna, its harbour.

Within Greece archaeological tours, the league that Olynthus headed grew quickly after the Peloponnesian War. It finally came to hold 32 member cities. The Peloponnesian War was a long conflict between Athens and Sparta and their allies across Greece.

How does ancient Abdera fit into Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours span a country whose Thracian coast held Abdera, a major Greek polis in classical antiquity. A polis was a city-state, ruling itself and the farmland around it. Thracian means of Thrace, a region along the northern Aegean shore.

The first Greek colony there came from Klazomenai and is traditionally dated to 654 BC. A colony is a new town founded by settlers from another city. That first attempt failed. Success came in 544 BC, when the bulk of the people of Teos moved to Abdera. They left Teos to escape a Persian invasion.

For Greece archaeological tours, the chief coin type of Abdera shows a griffon. Legend gave the griffon an eagle’s head and wings on a lion’s body. Teos used the very same coin type. Abdera ranked as the third richest city in the Delian League. It was a leading port for trade with inner Thrace.

In Greece archaeological tours, the ruins of the town lie on Cape Balastra. They spread over seven small hills, from an eastern harbour to a western one. A cape, or headland, is a spur of the coast running seaward. On the southwestern hills stand the remains of Polystylon, a medieval settlement. Medieval refers to the Middle Ages.

• Thinkers: Abdera counted the philosophers Democritus, Protagoras and Anaxarchus among its citizens.
• Name legend: Greek legend linked the name to Abderus, whose memory Hercules honoured by founding a city.
• Museum: The Archaeological Museum of Abdera ranks among the landmarks of present-day Abdera.

For Greece archaeological tours, Abdera declined after the fourth century AD. The town shrank back to its acropolis and was then abandoned. An acropolis is the high, walled part of an ancient Greek city. Nobody settled there again, apart from archaeologists at work.

What does Poliochne on Lemnos add to Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours share the island of Lemnos with Poliochne, an ancient settlement on its east coast. Today it also goes by its modern name, Poliochni. In this sense, a settlement is a cluster of homes where a community lived.

Poliochne was settled in the Late Chalcolithic and the earliest Aegean Bronze Age. Chalcolithic means the Copper Age, when people first worked copper beside stone. Bronze blends copper with tin. For Greece archaeological tours, the site is believed to be older than Troy I. Troy I is the first city level at Troy.

Regular digging seasons ran under A. Della Seta from 1931 to 1936. A season is one spell of fieldwork. Within Greece archaeological tours, Luigi Bernabò Brea directed the dig from 1951. He made the stratigraphy clearer by giving each phase of the settlement a colour. Stratigraphy is the study of the layers in which remains lie.

Under megaron 832, digging has shown seven layers in a row, over 2 metres deep. A megaron is a large hall with a porch, built as the main room of a house. Pottery of the Black period, the first phase, carries white painted decoration. The patterns on it are linear, meaning made of lines.

• Seals: Stamp seals, used to press a mark into soft clay, appear in the Blue period.
• House blocks: Yellow period houses form large blocks of rooms with megaron units at their core.
• Imported find: A cylinder seal brought from abroad was found in the Yellow period levels.

In Greece archaeological tours, the earliest layers of Poliochne show Anatolian features. Anatolia covers the Asian side of modern Turkey. Around 2500 BC, cultural influences from Helladic Greece began to shape them. Helladic refers to Bronze Age culture on the Greek mainland.

Which story does the Heraion of Samos give Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours on Samos share the island with the Heraion, a vast sanctuary of Hera. It lay 6 kilometres to the southwest of the old city of Samos. Here a sanctuary means ground kept sacred to a deity.

The sanctuary sat on low, marshy ground in the Imbrasos river basin, close to the sea. Among the gigantic free-standing Ionic temples, its late Archaic temple came first. The Archaic age is the period of Greek history before the Classical age. Ionic is a Greek building style with scroll-shaped tops on its columns.

At the yearly Samian festival of the Toneia, or binding, lygos branches bound Hera’s cult image. Then the image was carried down to the sea and washed. A cult image is a statue used in worship. Lygos is the chaste-tree, a shrub. For Greece archaeological tours, the Sacred Way road was first laid out around 600 BC.

The site’s first temple was the Hekatompedos, meaning hundred-foot temple, from the eighth century BC. Within Greece archaeological tours, a later temple was the work of two architects, Rhoikos and Theodoros. Its plan stretched roughly 100 metres long and 50 metres across. An architect draws up the design of a building.

• Great Temple: The Great Temple that followed covered a floor 108.6 metres long by 55.2 metres wide.
• Altar: The altar of Hera, a raised platform for offerings, was rebuilt seven times.
• Offerings: Animal bones show that fully grown cows made up the majority of sacrifices.

For Greece archaeological tours, the Great Temple served as a quarry in Byzantine times. Byzantine times are the centuries of the eastern Roman Empire. Its walls were dismantled right to the foundations. Those foundations and a single column shaft are all that remained.

What links Mount Lykaion with Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours have a link to Arcadia through Mount Lykaion, a mountain sacred to Zeus Lykaios. Ancient belief held that Zeus was born and raised on the mountain. Zeus ruled the Greek gods. Lykaios is a title of Zeus tied to this mountain.

The mountain rises to two peaks: Stefani in the north and St. Ilias in the south. The ancient altar of Zeus stands on St. Ilias. A peak is a mountain’s highest tip. The northern peak is the higher one, at 1,421 metres. The southern peak, St. Ilias, reaches 1,382 metres.

The sanctuary lower down the mountain hosted athletic games every four years, called the Lykaia. The events included footraces for men and for boys. Chariot races, boxing, wrestling and a pentathlon also featured. A pentathlon is a contest of five events. For Greece archaeological tours, the poet Pindar recorded Lykaia winners in his Victory Odes.

The ash altar is a circular mound of blackened earth about 1.5 metres high. It measures 30 metres in diameter. It is built up from the burned ash of offerings to Zeus. Within Greece archaeological tours, an excavation in 2007 focused on the altar. It found signs of activity there from as early as 3000 BC.

• Hippodrome: The hippodrome, a course for horse races, is said to be the only surviving one from Greek antiquity.
• Starting line: Diggers found seven stone starting blocks at the northern edge of the racetrack.
• Golden eagles: The ancient writer Pausanias described two pillars near the altar, once topped by golden eagles.

For Greece archaeological tours, the Greek Archaeological Service first dug at Mount Lykaion in 1897. The archaeologist K. Kontopoulos led that first season. A second dig followed in 1902 under K. Kourouniotes. The Archaeological Service is the state body that cares for ancient sites.

Why does the Antikythera mechanism matter to Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours connect with the Antikythera mechanism, built in the 2nd century BC. Turned by hand, it modelled the Solar System. A mechanism is a set of moving parts. Experts call this kind of working sky model an orrery.

The British science historian Derek de Solla Price took up the study of the device in 1951. A science historian traces how scientific ideas grew over time. In 1971, Price and the physicist Charalampos Karakalos imaged its 82 fragments with X-rays and gamma rays. Such rays pass through solid matter and reveal hidden inner parts.

In 1902, the archaeologist Valerios Stais spotted a gear wheel inside one of the rock pieces. A gear wheel has teeth that catch and turn another wheel. On Greece archaeological tours, an archaeologist means a person who studies the past through old objects. Albert Rehm, a German scholar, first saw it as a calculator for the sky.

Modern scans point to 35 bronze gears that once meshed, and 30 of them remain visible. Gears mesh when their teeth lock together and turn as one. Bronze is an alloy, a blend of two metals: copper and tin. For Greece archaeological tours, a scan means a picture of the inside of a solid object.

• Olympic rhythm: The device also kept count of the four-year rhythm of the Olympic Games of antiquity.
• Forecasts: Its users were able to predict eclipses and the positions of sky bodies decades ahead.
• Largest gear: The biggest wheel measures about 13 cm across and first carried 223 teeth.

Machines of matching complexity did not appear again for around 1,500 years. Early examples of such machines were astronomical clocks of the 14th century. On Greece archaeological tours, complexity means a large number of small parts working closely together.

Which questions does the Kasta Tomb raise for Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours in northern Greece link to the Kasta Tomb near Amphipolis. Macedonians built it in the last quarter of the 4th century BC. The name Macedonian points to Macedon, an ancient kingdom. The tomb lies inside a tall earth mound.

The first dig at the mound took place in 1964 and laid bare its perimeter wall. Within Greece archaeological tours, a dig means a careful search for old remains below the ground. A perimeter wall is the outer ring that marks the edge of a site. Diggers entered the inner tomb in August 2014.

The burial chamber held a 60-year-old woman and two men aged 35 to 45. On Greece archaeological tours, a burial chamber means the inner room where the dead were laid. It also held an infant and a fifth person who had been cremated. To cremate means to burn a body to ashes after death.

A floor mosaic in the second chamber shows Hades seizing Persephone and taking her away. Mosaic work sets tiny stones close together until they form a picture. Its makers chose black, white, grey, yellow, blue and red pebbles. For Greece archaeological tours, pebbles are small, smooth stones rounded by water.

• Hephaestion view: The excavation team tied the tomb to Hephaestion, Alexander’s dearest friend, through three inscriptions.
• Olympias view: Other experts argue that Olympias, the mother of Alexander, was buried in the tomb.
• Mound size: The mound rises about 30 m and needed 250,000 cubic metres of sand to fill.

The mound also covered older cemeteries with at least 70 graves. Those graves came from Hill 133, a settlement older than Amphipolis. A cemetery is a place set aside for burying the dead. A settlement is any cluster of houses where a community lived.

How does the Derveni papyrus link Greece archaeological tours to Europe’s oldest manuscript?

Greece archaeological tours tie in with the Derveni papyrus, found in 1962 at Derveni near Thessaloniki. The roll dates to around 340 BC. That age makes it the oldest manuscript, or handwritten text, to survive in Europe. A papyrus is a writing sheet made from reeds.

The find spot is a nobleman’s grave inside a necropolis of the ancient city of Lete. On Greece archaeological tours, a necropolis means a large burial ground. The Greek word means city of the dead. That necropolis formed part of a rich cemetery. A nobleman is a man born into a powerful, high-ranking family.

The roll lasted in damp Greek soil because the nobleman’s funeral pyre had turned it to carbon. A funeral pyre is a heap of wood lit to burn a body. Carbon is the black matter left behind when paper or wood burns. The papyrus now survives as 266 fragments, which sit under glass from largest to smallest.

The text gives an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem about how the gods were born. A commentary is writing that explains another text. Orphic means tied to the followers of Orpheus. Within Greece archaeological tours, allegorical describes a story that carries a hidden second meaning beneath its plain words.

• Columns: Once unrolled and pieced together, the fragments formed 26 columns of text.
• Greek dialects: The writing mixes Attic and Ionic forms of Greek, plus a small number of Doric ones.
• Museum home: The papyrus now rests in the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

In 2015, UNESCO placed the papyrus on its Memory of the World International Register. UNESCO belongs to the United Nations and works for culture, science and learning. On Greece archaeological tours, a register means an official list of important records and documents.

What does Lefkandi on Euboea bring to Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours on the island of Euboea relate to Lefkandi, a coastal village. Its ancient site lies between Chalkis and Eretria, the two main cities on the island in antiquity. Antiquity means the ancient past of Greece and Rome.

The site’s importance became clear in 1980, during digs by Evi Touloupa with the British School at Athens. The team found a large mound that held two shaft graves. In a shaft grave, the body lies at the foot of a deep, narrow pit. On Greece archaeological tours, a mound means a heap of earth raised over graves.

One body in the grave had been burned to ashes. The ashes lay in fringed linen cloth inside a bronze amphora from Cyprus. An amphora is a tall jar with two handles. Linen is cloth woven from flax. On Greece archaeological tours, fringed cloth means cloth with loose threads along its edges.

A woman, buried beside a wall, wore an electrum ring and a gorget. Electrum is a natural mix of gold and silver. A gorget is a collar piece worn at the throat. Experts think the gorget came from Babylonia, an ancient land of the Near East. Near her shoulder lay an iron knife with an ivory handle.

• Horse grave: The second grave held four horses that appear to have been sacrificed.
• Early hall: An older plan sets the building of about 950 BCE at 50 by 13.8 metres.
• Trade links: Finds from the cemeteries show trade with Cyprus and the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean coast.

Life at Lefkandi faded just as settlement in nearby Eretria grew. The excavators argue that the site was in fact Old Eretria, an earlier form of that city. On Greece archaeological tours, an excavator is a person who digs a site and records each find.

Who was Christos Tsountas in the story of Greece archaeological tours?

Greece archaeological tours touch on the work of Christos Tsountas, a Greek classical archaeologist. He lived from 1857 to 1934. The scholar Sofia Voutsaki has called him the first and foremost Greek prehistorian. A prehistorian studies the time before people wrote records.

In 1880, Tsountas earned a doctorate from the University of Jena. A doctorate is the top degree a university gives, earned through original research. Original research means new study that adds fresh knowledge to a field. On Greece archaeological tours, a classical archaeologist means an expert on the remains of ancient Greece and Rome.

In 1884, Tsountas led an underwater survey at the Battle of Salamis site, fought in 480 BCE. Poor weather left the whole effort largely unsuccessful. Even so, it was possibly the first archaeological work done under water. Such a survey maps and records whatever lies in a chosen area.

In 1889, Tsountas carried out the first systematic archaeological study of Thessaly. Systematic means done step by step, following a clear plan. At Marmariani he found the first evidence of Neolithic life in Greece. On Greece archaeological tours, Neolithic refers to the New Stone Age, the era when farming began.

• Looted graves: On Amorgos he found the island’s two largest cemeteries badly looted by illegal diggers.
• Professor: In 1904 the University of Athens elected him its professor of ancient art history.
• Academy: In 1926 he joined the Academy of Athens, the national academy of Greece.

He also showed that mounds called magoules can be tells. A tell is a hill that grows from the layers of settlements built one on top of another. On Greece archaeological tours, a layer means one band of soil left behind by one period of life.

What do travellers ask about Greece archaeological tours, and what are the answers?

Greece archaeological tours take place in a country whose Archaeological Society of Athens dates to 1837. Konstantinos Bellios founded the learned society. A learned society is a club of scholars who study one subject. It aimed to encourage digs and to protect and display ancient objects.

Before Greece archaeological tours, who led digs for the Archaeological Society of Athens?

From 1859 to 1894, the epigraphist Stefanos Koumanoudis held the post of secretary in the society. An epigraphist is an expert on old writing cut into stone. He started large digs around Athens, at sites such as the Theatre of Dionysus. A secretary runs the daily business of a group.

On Greece archaeological tours, what is a kouros?

Kouros is the modern name for free-standing ancient Greek statues of nude young men. Free-standing means the figure stands by itself. Over one hundred came from the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoion in Boeotia alone. A sanctuary is ground set apart as holy to a god. The scholar Leonardos first proposed the term in 1895.

For Greece archaeological tours, which god does the Artemision Bronze show?

The Artemision Bronze was pulled from waters off Cape Artemision, in the north of Euboea. The statue stands slightly over life-size, at 2.09 metres. Scholars mostly read it as Zeus, ruler of the gods and lord of thunder. Others link it with Poseidon instead. Life-size means the same size as a living human.

In Greece archaeological tours, what are the Vapheio cups?

Christos Tsountas dug the tholos tomb at Vapheio in 1889. A tholos is a round stone tomb with a domed roof. Its finest finds are two gold cups with raised scenes of bull catching, a style called relief. Experts now hold one cup to be Minoan and the other Mycenaean, two Bronze Age styles.