Abdera and its perfunctory museum

So, there are only a couple of top level (4s or 5s according to our bible, the Mythological Atlas of Greece) archeological sites in the panhandle of Greece.  Abdera (also called Avdira) was about an hour west for us.  As we left the apartment and told the owner's mother where we were going, she gave us a quizzical expression.  Why would someone drive there?

Well, it turns out the site is a recent excavation from about 1950-60, and some of the functions of the rooms were mislabeled, and much of the site was used by whatever dominant group came to the live in/take over the area.  Randall's favorite mislabeling was “The House of Amphorae” which the archaeologist thought was a storage facility for olive oil.  Turns out it was a luxurious mansion where the amphorae had been deliberately sawn in half and buried as part of an elaborate drainage system (when you live on flat arable land near a seaport, and have enough money, drainage is an solvable issue).  However, over 8 centuries of repurposing were represented here (from approx. 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.), and as we have no interest in anything that isn't Greek, this was a difficult site to process.  2m thick defensive walls had been removed during "Pax Romana", to make houses, which we noted were very close together, and sarcophagi. 

But our big takeways were:

1.  They use fire for weed control.  They just burned everything in and around the ruins.  However, since these ruins abut to farm land (and were probably discovered inadvertently while plowing, much like the Temple to Heracles in the Lafazanis vineyards), they have to make sure the fire doesn't get out of control, so unlike any other archeological site we have visited, this one has fire control systems located everywhere.  I have carefully cropped them out of my photos, though.

2.  The Greeks used catapults for defense, and in the flagrant use of marble category, they use marble for the catapult bullets!!!

3.  This site doesn't get many visitors, and they don't seem to care.  We were the only one there for the 1.5 hours it took us to see all the ruins and read all the signs.  Here is an example of how they explain their site.  The last paragraph made us chuckle.

4.  Every archaeological site, it seems, has to have a museum to house all the things that were found, and since it was included in the price of admission to the site and was only 7km away, we went. The children's tour group was fortunately just leaving, otherwise, the museum would have simply been a marble echo chamber of torture.  As we were now the only visitors to the museum, however, we attracted a monitor to watch us.  She would have made a bad spy, and if Randall and I had been more interested, we would have split up to observe whom she considered more important to watch.  Anyway, she professed to speaking English, but then said we seemed "confused" over some of the exhibits.  When I asked her which ones, she noted a display that we had said was a board game.  I pointed to the card on the exhibit which read "gaming board", and which seemed to have been discovered in a series of children's graves along with some game pieces.  She was unfazed, and told me it was a calculator.  When I then asked why the sign read "gaming board" and not "calculator", she replied with "what can I do?"  I confirmed that she worked for the museum.  Yes.  Ok.  Apparently, mocking the visitors is all she can do.  Add this to the list of places we are never going to visit again.

Here's a picture of the gaming board/calculator.  Enjoy!