The
Museum of Cycladic Art, the Regional Services of the
Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports (Ephorates of Antiquities of Chania, Rethymno, and Herakleion) and the
Region of Crete are co-organizing the exhibition entitled
“Crete. Emerging cities: Aptera ― Eleutherna ― Knossos. Three ancient cities revived” from
12 December 2018 to 30 April 2019. This is a multi-faceted exhibition
with rich audio-visual aids, including screens, maps, and innovative
technologies.
Terracotta bust of bearded male figure, possibly Zeus, 31 BC – 324 AD. Photo: George Anastasakis © Museum of Cycladic Art.
The exhibition focuses on three of Crete’s one-hundred cities,
according to Homer (hekatompolis), and their common characteristics:
their establishment, acme, decline, destruction, abandonment, and
demise. Cities with centuries-long history, cities that were abandoned
and forgotten, but are also tangible examples of archaeological
investigation using similar or different approaches.
The exhibition comprises approximately 500 artefacts dating from the
Neolithic (7th-6th millennium BC) to the Byzantine period (8th century
AD), some newly discovered, others from old excavations, most of them
never presented to the public before: statues, reliefs, figurines,
inscriptions, vases, weapons, jewellery, coins, and other artefacts of
various materials—limestone, marble, clay, metal (bronze, iron, silver,
and gold), faience, glass, ivory, and semi-precious stones. This is the
first time that so many artefacts leave the storerooms of the
Antiquities Ephorates and display cases of the museums of Crete for a
temporary exhibition in Athens.
Antiquities from each one of the three cities speak
of its territory, public and private life, religious beliefs,
sanctuaries, and cemeteries, fragments of its historical continuum. A
special place is given to artefacts relating to each city’s founding
myths and also to personal stories: Soterios from Eleutherna who live
and died at Aptera, the young man of Eleutherna who died before knowing
love, and the child buried with their toys at Knossos.
The earliest of the three, Knossos, has a long history of
exploration, well known and well recorded since Minos Kalokairinos and
Arthur Evans to the present day. With its reconstructed palace and
millions of visitors, Knossos is now the second most popular
archaeological site in Greece after the Athenian Acropolis. The present
exhibition, however, focuses not on the famous palace but on the city
that lay beyond it both spatially and temporally. It showcases the
copious and continuous efforts of archaeologists in the Archaeological
Service and the British School at Athens, and of all those who
contribute in one way or another to provide as full a picture as
possible of this great Cretan city. The present exhibition demonstrates
that Knossos was not just a palace but an entire city that stretched
beyond it, a city whose history began long before the palace was built,
in the Neolithic period, and lasted long after it was destroyed; a city
with a vast territory, served by its harbours and cemeteries not only
during the Old and New Palace periods but also later, in the Geometric,
Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, a city that was
Christianised in the Early Byzantine period, as its Early Christian
basilicas and other finds testify.
Eleutherna is a different story. Here, systematic
excavation began recently, and the site’s conservation, restoration, and
promotion were approached differently thanks to the lessons learned at
Knossos. Eleutherna was all but forgotten after the ancient and medieval
city’s forced abandonment. It was either incorrectly marked (usually
east or south of its actual location), or confused with Apollonia to the
northwest of Herakleion, or omitted altogether on many Cretan maps of
the 15th to 17th centuries. There are occasional references to the site
during this period, either by travellers who visited it, who reported
from hearsay, or who compiled information provided by others. This was
remedied in the 18th and, especially, 19th centuries, when the site’s
correct location was given on maps and references to the site became
more specific. Rivalries between foreign archaeological schools
(particularly the British and Italian Schools) over who would excavate
Eleutherna delayed the site’s exploration. It wasn’t until the Cretan
State developed an interest in promoting Crete’s Greek identity that
Eleftherios Venizelos asked educator Efstathios Petroulakis to restore
the Hellenistic bridge, which a flood had destroyed in 1898, as part of a
programme to modernise the island’s road network in 1908. In the same
year, Petroulakis became the first to investigate part of the acropolis
there. Humfry Payne conducted a short-lived archaeological excavation in
1929, but systematic investigations did not begin until the University
of Crete surveyed the site in 1984 and initiated the on-going
excavations the following year.
Aptera, a city that
commands Souda Bay and the far reaches of the Apokoronas plain, was
investigated in a similar manner to Eleutherna, although 15th-century
maps gave a more accurate location. Robert Pashley identified the city
in 1834, and the French Archaeological School conducted the first
excavations in 1862 and 1864. Ioannis Svoronos and Stefanos Xanthoudidis
referred to Aptera in their written works in the late 19th century, and
Margherita Guarducci published inscriptions from Aptera in the 1940s.
In 1942, V. Theofanidis supervised the German occupation forces
excavation of a two-roomed temple. Rescue excavations by the Greek
Archaeological Service began in 1958. In 1984, when the University of
Crete expressed an interest in excavating at either Aptera or
Eleutherna, the Hellenic Ministry of Culture decided on the latter. The
Archaeological Service (former 25th Ephorate of Prehistoric and
Classical Antiquities, current Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania)
conducts the current systematic excavations at Aptera.
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