GREECE PELOPONNESE KORINTHIA AIDONIA

Prologue

Years of searching for Aidonia - what an adventure. But I finally made it and when you know where it is then it is remarkably easy. - When you reach the first houses of the small village of Aidonia from the South you will see the sign to the site and as you follow the dirt road uphill you finally arrive at the upper parts of the Mycenaean cemetery with beautiful views to the fertile Nemean valley.

The Mycenaean cemetery of Aidonia includes more than 20 high quality chamber tombs of the 16th-14th century BC, i.e. in the pre-palatial period. Many tombs at the site contained elite burial goods such as gold signet rings and jewellery of various types and were devastatingly looted in the 1970s.

What followed could be the plot of a crime movie including a quarrel between the grave robbers over their booty and a nightly gun fight. There is some speculation about what happened then but the grave goods were somehow smugggled out of Greece - hidden in water melons according to rumours. Then, in 1993, the Michael Ward Gallery in New York announced that it was selling an important collection of Mycenaean jewelry, described as "rare gold baubles: small, ancient and radiant". Bidding was to start at US $1.5 million. American archaeologists soon recognized the provenance of the collection and lawyers for the Greek government demanded the return of the pieces. - In May 1993, they obtained an injunction from a US court, preventing the sale, and in December an out-of-court settlement was reached which ended with the return of the "Aidonia Treasure" to Greece, now on display in the museum of Nemea.

In order to combat the continued looting, a program to secure the site and also to establish proper pathways and signage was planned in 2015, but during my yearly visits since 2017 up until 2024 nothing of this was to be seen. On the other hand, official excavations continue, and in 2018 an undisturbed tomb was unearthed, another two in 2019 and so forth.

The Mycenaean cemetery of Aidonia consists of chamber tombs, with only one exception. They follow the usual tripartite Mycenaean funeral architecture (for an introduction to Mycenaean burials: see here). In Aidonia the tombs are usually more or less square in plan, sometimes ending in an apse. In several cases the thalamos looks like the interior of a Mycenaean house wirh gable roof, in some tombs even with a ridge pole. Several tombs also have benches cut into the rock on one or more sides of the chamber.

Up until now, all of the chamber tombs in Aidonia, most of them with intact ceilings, can be entered freely. Only the shaft grave and meanwhile a very few chamber tombs are closed off for safety reasons. And some of the tombs of very recent excavations have been refilled.

Above: This is only a part of the Mycenaean cemetery of Aidonia.

Above right: The tombs on a satellite image. - Below right: An old, not very accurate map exhibited in the museum of Nemea shows 20 tombs, in 2021 there were at least 29 and more still to be detected. This is my much improved map, here in reduced resolution, based also on satellite images. Note that North is here to the left.

The subsequent compilation follows the traditional numbers given to the tombs and does not correspond to the path that you would usually follow.