Potter’s Field

Dr. Stroszeck, of the German Archeological Institute, is not very pleased to see us.  True, she’s gracious and smiling as we arrive, but her attention strays often to the roped-off excavation site behind her.  We’d arranged by email to meet her at eleven o’clock, and we’re right on time, so I’m not sure what is wrong.  “Is this a bad time?” I venture.  “No,” she says, and then quickly modifies her answer.  “Well, it’s just that we’ve found something ...”

I’m immediately agog, of course.  What does she mean by “something”?  What have they found?  But I’m also feeling a bit out of place, as if I’d arrived at an embassy reception wearing pajamas.  So I try to be diplomatic.  I suggest that perhaps we should return later, when she’s not so busy.  She glances over her shoulder again, where a team of people are at work, including a couple of men shoulder-deep in a trench, who are taking careful measurements of ... something.  “No,” she decides.  “We have half-an-hour.  Come and have some coffee in the office.  What would you like to talk about?”

Jutta Stroszeck is director of the excavations at the Kerameikos, an ancient archeological site in Athens.  Exploration of the site has been conducted by the German Archeological Institute at Athens, with significant interruptions for two world wars, since 1913.  German archeologists have been prominent in Greece and Turkey since the mid-nineteenth century.  Heinrich Schliemann, whose dramatic finds at Troy and Mycenae created a worldwide sensation, is the most famous, but his friend and colleague Wilhelm Dörpfeld was a pioneer of careful documentation and stratigraphic dating.  He worked at Troy as well as Tiryns, Olympia and elsewhere, and was a Director of the German Archeological Institute at Athens.

The story of early German archeologists in the ancient Greek world is a fascinating subject, and that is what I had intended to ask Dr. Stroszeck about, and particularly the history of Kerameikos itself.  Of course, right now, what I want to know about is the mysterious object being unearthed fifty feet away.  “A stele, we think,” she says.  “We’ll know more, later.”

A stele – my mind turns immediately to the exquisite small museum, designed by the German architect Heinz Johanne, that sits just inside the entrance of the Kerameikos.  My wife Pat (who is also my photographer) and I visited it while waiting for today’s appointment.  It was built in 1937 with money from Dr. Gustav Oberlander, a German-American stocking manufacturer. The museum houses extraordinary finds from the site:  Attic vases of the very highest quality, as well as original sculpture from archaic and classical Athens, which greater museums, stuffed with Roman copies, can only dream of.  Some of the finest sculptures are scenes in relief carved on marble slabs – stelae – used as grave markers.  Could another masterpiece be emerging from the earth? It’s certainly possible, for the Kerameikos is an extraordinarily rich place, archeologically speaking; and its richness is explained by its long and complex history.

Located northwest of the Acropolis, near the ancient Agora, Kerameikos is named for the Kerameis – potters – who lived and worked here for centuries.  A small river, the Eridanos, deposited fine-grained clay along its banks, perfect for the production of fine pottery.  Many ancient workshops and kilns dot the area.  The river still runs through the site, mostly under stone coverings from the period of Roman domination, but visible here and there.  It’s a little stream, now – just a trickle, really – and yet for millenia it carried the clay from which art and prosperity were made.

Besides ceramics, the valley was also used for another purpose: it is the ancient graveyard of Athens.  There are tombs as old as the early Bronze Age, though most date from 1200 B.C. and later.  So, many of the most important finds, whether pottery or sculpture or structures, have been associated with burials.  Elaborate grave monuments from the late Classical period, beginning around 430 BC, once lined a path called “The Street of the Tombs”.  Around 317 BC, a law was passed banning ostentatious memorials, and much more modest tombstones became the norm, but when the street was unearthed, it yielded amazing treasures of statuary.

From the Classical era, the most impressive, in size at least, was a huge marble bull marking the grave of the wealthy treasurer Dionysios.  A copy of the bull still stands on its plinth, towering over the street; and the original dominates the sunlit inner courtyard of the museum.  The memorial stele for Pamphile, bidding farewell to her sister Demetria, is artistically unequaled in the museum.

But the most touching memorial, for me, is the Stele of Ampharete.  It is a marble slab, carved in superb relief, showing a woman holding a small child.  At first glance, you would say it depicts a mother and child, but there is an inscription:  “I hold the beloved child of my daughter, whom I held on my knees when, alive, we saw the light of the sun. Now I hold the child dead, myself also dead.”

As we follow Dr. Stroszeck toward her office, I notice that several sections of massive walls are still standing. Just outside her small office building, she shows us an outdoor workplace full of wooden tables loaded with sherds of pottery, bits and pieces of stone, and other material in plastic bins awaiting sorting, I suppose. The space is roofed by a grapevine-covered trellis.  It seems a pleasant space to solve such fascinating jigsaw puzzles. In her office, over tiny cups of strong Greek coffee, we learn more of the history of the site, and of the ancient walls.

After the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC, they were lured by the Athenian leader Themistocles into a naval battle off Salamis.  The Athenians were triumphant, and won a final land battle at Plataea, but had to return to a devastated city.  In 478 BC, Themistocles convinced the citizens of Athens to build a great protective wall around the city, and in their haste to complete it, many of the funerary monuments in the old graveyard became part of the wall.  As it happened, Persian armies never again stormed the city, but the wall, which was repaired and renovated at least three times over the centuries, helped fend off Spartan forces during the Peloponnesian War (though Sparta eventually won), and helped withstand several other sieges during the fourth and third centuries BC.

The wall bisected the Kerameikos, so that part of the old cemetery was incorporated into the city proper, and burials, after it was built, were limited to the area outside the walls.  Within the Kerameikos, the wall was pierced by two great gates – one, the Dipylon Gate, was designed to trap besiegers within a courtyard surrounded by fortifications (possibly the first example of what military architects call a “bag trap”).  It was the principal entrance to Athens in antiquity, and every four years served as the staging area for a great festival – the Panathenaic Procession – up the Acropolis to make sacrifices at the temple of Athena, the city’s patron goddess.

Another great fortified portal was nearby.  It was called the Sacred Gate because the road through it led from Athens to Eleusis, where secret ceremonies called the Eleusinian Mysteries were held.  These were celebrations of the cult of Demeter and Persephone.  Later, in the early fourth century BC, a huge public building called the Pompeion was added between the gates, and it served many purposes over the ensuing centuries, some religious and some practical:  processions were staged there, but at various times it served as a storehouse, a marketplace, and even as a gymnasium for young athletes.  “Diogenes lived and worked there,” Dr. Stroszeck says.  Diogenes, I finally recall, was the cynic philosopher who claimed he couldn’t find an honest man, even with the help of his lamp.  No doubt this irked his neighbors.

She also tells us that the excavation work carried out by the German Archeological Institute is done in cooperation with the Greek Ministry of Culture, and that active excavation in the site is limited to six weeks per year.  “It gives us time to document, record and publish our findings,” she explains.  “How much more is still to be found in Kerameikos?” I ask. 

“We – the German Archeological Institute – have been working here for a hundred years,” she smiles.  “The site is about 38,000 square meters, and one-fourth of it has not been touched.  There are many more discoveries to be made.” 

I can see that she is anxious to get back to work, so together we walk back along the great wall, past the tumbled walls of potters’ workshops and the depressions left by their kilns, past the remains of the Sacred Gate, to where the excavators have erected a tripod of stout wooden poles.  From its apex hangs a block and tackle, the chains disappearing into the pit.  “I’m afraid I can’t invite you into the work area,” Dr. Stroszeck says.  “Can I take pictures from behind the ropes?” Pat asks.  Dr. Stroszeck nods, smiles, shakes our hands and hurries toward the pit.  A crowd, sensing something special, has gathered on our side of the ropes.  Pat raises her camera, but a burly figure hurries toward the crowd.  “No pictures!” he says.  Dr. Stroszeck is now fully occupied, so we decide to shift our position, out of the Kerameikos and onto the street above the excavation site.  Here we have a much better view of the site than behind the ropes anyway. 

There are people in the pit, working on ... something.  The chains rattle, then tighten.  Up from the darkness something is emerging.  The chains stop.  The archeologists bend to their tasks again, securing their find to the bed of a rubber-tired cart, which is half-in, half-out, of the pit.  We cannot see what’s there.

One man pulls on the cart’s handle.  Three men in the pit push and shove, and the cart slowly climbs out of the earth.  Now, at last – a marble slab, four or perhaps five feet long, cushioned by a pad of foam, rests on the cart’s bed, strapped securely in place.  Now we’re looking almost directly down on the object as the cart is slowly, carefully rolled away from the pit.

I can see what the cart carries now, masked by dirt, of course.  There is an image in the stone.  I feel a thrill of recognition.  I remember the stele of Ampharete, with the dead woman holding her grandchild.  And now, in the stone below us, I can see the carved head of a woman, her shoulder, her arm reaching out – and though the stone is broken in half lengthwise, I can see her hand touching something, perhaps the small head of a child.  I can see more of the woman now; she seems to be seated, which would indicate a grave stele in which she is the deceased person.  Another figure seems to stand behind her, perhaps a man; but there is too much dirt in the hollows of the relief to be sure.  

But I think this is a grave stele showing the dead woman saying farewell to her family.  It’s a type of gravestone often made in the fourth century B.C., a type which spoke eloquently about love and loss.  I think about all the memorials in stone and clay that marked the graves of Kerameikos.  Potters made everyday vessels here, of course, but they also made funerary vessels called lethykoi and other beautiful ceramic ware honoring the dead; and the greatest of ancient sculptors carved idealized images of the departed in marble – all in the hope that, for a time at least, the dead would not be forgotten.

A few who were laid to rest in Kerameikos are indeed still remembered, with or without gravestones.  There is part of a bronze cauldron in the museum that once contained the ashes of Alcibiades, the bad boy of the Pelopponesian war, who fought for Athens, Sparta, the Persians, and then Athens again – and lost.  Pericles’ grave was near the Street of Tombs.  The great leader of Athens’ golden age died in a plague now thought to have been typhoid, in 429 BC.

Nearly two and a half millenia since her family said goodbye to her, I wonder about this woman’s memorial.  Where was her grave? How did the stone come to be broken in half?  Was it used to repair Themistocles’ wall?  Did it become part of another structure somewhere along the Sacred Way?  How long has it remained undisturbed, buried like the woman it honored? She, of course, is long since dust, and long since forgotten. 

Will she be remembered again here in the Kerameikos, the old Potter’s Field?  When Dr. Stroszeck and her team clean the ancient soil from the marble, will they find an inscription on the stone – like that on Ampharete’s – that will speak her name?  

Text © 2016 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2016 by Patricia Gartman. First published as “Unearthing the Treasures of Potter’s Field” in German Life Magazine, Feb/March 2016