Modern Description:
20 km beyond Platanistos the unsurfaced road turns west and begins to circumvent the Archampolis Gorge. This wild and majestic landscape appears to have been inhabited in antiquity, and although no city or town as such has been identified, the scattered remains which have been found may well have belonged to a single, organised, but disparate, settlement. Habitation seems to stretch from the Archaic period through to the 1st century BC, when the area was abandoned, perhaps following an attack by Mithradates in 80 BC. An acropolis (on the conical eminence overlooking the outlet to the sea), a large drakospito-like structure with evidence – unusually – both of residential and possible cultic use, a farmstead, and an iron-ore smelting furnace and workshop have all been located within a circumscribed area, near the riverbed at the eastern end of the valley. Above the small harbor are ruins of a small temple with classical pottery. (The sites are best reached by the footpath which leads from the road just to the north of the settlement of Evangelismos – which lies to the south of the gorge – and descends north into the valley. A similar but longer foot-path descends south from the houses at Thymi, which lies to the north of the gorge.) Wikidata ID: Q12874057 DARE: 29308
