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Modern Description: From Vasilikó a by-road descends in 2 km, through a spreading area of suburban coastal residences, to Lefkandí, a site that has illuminated a hitherto little understood period of early history – referred to pejoratively as the ‘Dark Age' – between the 11th and 9th centuries BC. In precisely this period, Lefkandi, which had nonetheless been inhabited from the Early Bronze Age, became a particularly flourishing and important centre for a wide area of Eastern Greece, the Islands, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Then, around 700 BC, it was deserted and is heard of no more. Lefkandi has been suggested by some as the site of ‘Old Eretria', the city Homer linked with Chalcis in the Catalogue of Ships, and which was the city Strabo saw and claimed (incorrectly) to be the city sacked by the Persians in 490 BC. Archaeological evidence has now shown that the city which the Persians destroyed was on the site of present-day Eretria.
The fascinating finds that come from Lefkandi are in the Museum in Eretria. On site there are two main points of interest – the settlement itself, where for the visitor there is little to see, and the the remarkable ‘Heröon' which lies a short distance away. The latter, however, should not be missed because of its considerable archaeological and architectural importance.
The settlement site lies a short walk from the south end of the main bay. The top of the flat headland of Xeropolis here was explored in 1965/66 and 1969/70 by the British School and found to be a settlement with three associated cemeteries. The excavations yielded unusually informative layers of Late Helladic IIIC through to Proto-Geometric material (12th to 10th centuries BC). The material suggests significant wealth, as well as clear commercial links with Cyprus and the Levant coast after the middle of the 10th century BC.
In a modern residential area, 200m uphill to the north of the harbour (between Chrysanthemon and Plateon Streets, on ‘Toumba Hill'), are the remains of the *Heröon, now covered by a functional protective roof. These are the surface vestiges of what would have been a spacious and ambitious, peripteral structure – the largest building of its period (c. 1000 BC) so far known in Greece. It was built of mud-brick on a high (1.5 m) stone socle and measured about 14m wide by almost 50m long, with an apsidal end to the west and an entrance from the east. With internal and external wooden colonnades supporting a steeply raking roof, it represents a new form of monumental architecture and in many important aspects it prefigures later Greek temple design. In the main chamber was buried a man, a woman and four horses: the cremated remains of the warrior, wrapped in a fine cloth, had been placed in a bronze urn, together with the body of the woman surrounded by rich accoutrements. Unlike the warrior, the woman had not been cremated; the finding of a knife close to her head has led to speculation that she may have perished in a ritual sacrifice. It is particularly notable that the building was demolished in the same generation as it was constructed and deliberately covered with a mound, probably so as to form a hero-shrine to the deceased buried within. It provides a crucial link in a possible continuity of architectural design between the Bronze Age and the historic period in Greece; it helps us to understand the design of the very earliest temples built at sites such as the Heraion on Samos and the pan-Aetolian sanctuary at Thermon on mainland Greece. But the fascinating questions the building raises about cultic practice in this important transitional period are more perplexing, since it cannot yet be established whether this building was originally constructed as a palace or ‘megaron' for the dignitaries later buried in it, or specifically as a place for honouring their passing, or even whether there was any primary divine aspect to the building and its cult which may have led to the burials under its roof.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lefkandi
Wikidata ID: Q634655
Trismegistos Geo: 34091

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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