HISTORY
DESCRIPTION
INFORMATION
PHOTOGALLERY
 
 
The archaeological site at Kotzia Square includes the Acharnean Street, with its sidewalks and funerary monuments, tombs of different types from various time periods on either side of the street, and Roman pottery workshops with their kilns, paved clay basins, and plumbing installations.

Acharnean Street was reconstructed and remodelled in the fourth century BC. Its sidewalks of carefully assembled rectangular ashlar blocks and the four podiums for funerary monuments, which line the sidewalks, all date from this period. The road was used until the second half of the third century AD, when pottery workshops settled in the area. An intersection with a street leading east, along the course of present day G. Stavrou Street, was part of the original (fifth century BC) street plan.


The cemetery, which spanned either side of the Acharnean Road, remained in use for more than a millennium. 672 graves of various types were excavated: simple rock-hewn shafts, stone or terracotta-built graves, stone sarcophagi, terracotta larnakes, and children's jar-burials of different periods. Some rock-hewn shafts contained traces of cremations and inhumations that are contemporary to each other.


Over thirty Late Roman pottery kilns were excavated in the area. They were built of baked bricks, and most of them were rectangular. Some retained both the burning chamber and the firing chamber above it, and two still had the terracotta grills that held the vases during firing. A large number of paved basins for mixing clay and water and for separating the unwanted inclusions were also found.
Author
Olga Zachariadou, archaeologist