Pella became the capital of the Macedonian kingdom in the 5th century BC and flourished throughout the Hellenistic period. It was quite some city too! From the 4th century BC, the city’s layout was that of a regular grid of uniform blocks, divided by by 6-9m-wide roads. This basic structure allowed systematic expansion of the city over the following 3 centuries. Many of the roads were paved and the wider ones had pavements and colonnades. Below them lay dense, well-organised water and drainage networks.
Though the ancient city was extremely well-organised, the current archaeological site is a little less so. However, recent work makes the city’s size and structure much clearer for the lay-person to appreciate than is the case at most sites and, once at a point of interest, there are detailed information boards.
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| Pottery workshop and kiln |
We started our tour of the site at the pottery workshops, purely because we could see some large signs in that area and guessed that there might be something interesting there. The workshops apparently follow the standard pattern of buildings in the city; a flagged central courtyard with a well and an altar, around which the various rooms are arranged. The workshops had everything a potter would require: storage space for clay, basins for washing it, a good water supply (through terracotta pipes), rooms for making the pots, kilns, etc. Most of Pella was destroyed in the third quarter of the 3rd century BC, a fact based on the pottery found in the workshops and in the kilns, which were destroyed whilst firing was in progress.
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| Public baths |
We saw 2 sets of pottery workshops. Next to the northern-most is the site of one of the ancient city’s public baths. These were only discovered about 20 years ago, with excavations completed 10 years later. It is one of the oldest bathing facility known in Greece having been built in the last quarter in the 4th century BC. It was built with just a pool but later 2 rooms with tubs were added as well as an under-floor heating system. The under-floor heating is one of the oldest example of this type of heating in Greece, pre-dating the development of the hypocaust system, which the Romans used.
From the bathhouse we walked north up to the site through a large residential area. Each of the residential blocks had 2 or more buildings, the largest covering 2,500-3,000m2, the smallest 125-500m2. Most had a central courtyard around which the rooms were arranged, usually behind covered porticoes. In larger houses the family lived on the upper floor, the north of the building was preferred – presumably to be out of the summer heat. All of the houses had storerooms and sanitary facilities. Water came from the house’s own well and cistern(s) and water was also piped in from the street mains to a fountain in the courtyard. The reception rooms, particularly in the very wealthy properties, had mosaic floors some made with coloured pebbles, some with mosaic tiles.
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| A cobbled together version of the very large mosaic showing Helen being abducted by Thesius |
A couple of large houses have been found in Pella. The first we looked at is known as the Helen House, after the mosaic floor in the banqueting room which depicts Helen’s abduction by Theseus. Amazingly, the original is still in place at the archaeological site, albeit protected by a wriggly-tin roof.
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| Deer hunt mosaic |
Similarly located is the original of the deer hunt mosaic, which is in even better condition. Both have been amazingly well preserved, despite everything that the intervening millennia have thrown at them.
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| Public Archive |
From Helen House we visited the remains of the Public Archive. In its day this had been a 2-storey building with a central courtyard and it was here that public documents were transcribed, sealed and stored. Here archaeologists found scores of clay seals from public documents which fell from the first floor and were hardened by the heat when fire destroyed the building.
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| Agora |
Like some of the residential areas of the ancient city, the agora has, relatively recently, undergone a certain amount of reconstruction work to make it easier for the non-specialist to fully appreciate its size and layout. The agora makes up a huge area of the sity site – approximately 10 residential blocks or 7 hectares. It had a large central courtyard surrounded by colonnaded buildings containing 2 levels of square rooms.
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| Agora Administrative Centre |
The agora was an administrative centre for the city and a place of trade and craft. Many of the buildings/rooms contained wells and areas of the agora featured, for example, terracotta workshops. The monumental gates leading onto each of the four main city streets were no longer much in evidence when we visited but it was clear that there had been some pretty impressively sized roads leading into agora.
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| Dionysos House |
Our final stop was at the remains of the largest house in Pella – Dionysus’ House, so called because of one of two significant mosaics found in the reception rooms of the house. Both these mosaics, Dionysus riding a panther and a lion hunt in progress (as well as a smaller one found in a niche or doorway) have been removed from the archaeological site and taken to the museum; there are plaques in the centre of the pebble mosaic surround where they used to be. The Dionysus House was clearly an extremely grand place as not only did 2 of the (enormous) reception rooms have such exquisitely fashioned pictorial mosaics, but another 2 large rooms had fantastic geometric pebble mosaics.
So, having covered the archaeological site and been able to appreciate the size and wealth of ancient Pella, we went up to the museum to get a look at some of the artefacts from the site and to see the Dionysus House mosaics in all their glory.
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| Pella, Greece |
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