Archaeological Site of Kerameikos: The city of the living and the dead

In this episode, we wander to the north-western edge of ancient Athens, to what the historian Thucydides called the “most beautiful suburb” – Kerameikos – where the River Eridanos gave life to potters’ workshops and serenity to the city’s dead. We discover how Themistocles’ wall divided the area into two and follow the Street of the Tombs in ancient Athens’ most important cemetery, seeking the stories behind the funerary stele of Dexileos, the imposing marble bull from the burial enclosure of Dionysios of Kollytos and the relief of Hegeso. From the two great gates of the city walls – the Dipylon and the Sacred Gate – to the place where the great Athenian statesman Pericles delivered the Funeral Oration for those who fell during the first year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), Kerameikos reveals itself not as a silent place of death, but as an eternal mirror of Athenian glory, art and everyday life. And perhaps more striking still, it introduces us to the faces and families of ancient Athens.