Where Alexander was the home-town boy: Pella
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2008
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18
26
Trip End
Jul 01, 2008
Thessaloniki, Macedonia Region, Greece
Friday, June 27, 2008
Current-day Makedonians are plenty proud of that era - you see signs of it everywhere, from Alexander busts sold in periptera (kiosk stores on sidewalks) to the Makedonian starburst showing up on statue plinths, signs, souvenirs, etc.
The fact that they have barely scratched the surface, so to speak, in excavating the former capital has to do with a) its size (some 1200 acres) b) funding (archaeology is fiendishly labour-intensive and accordingly pricey) and c) the obstacles inherent in excavating land that is occupied by currently-lived in houses, producing olive groves, etc. Old Pella is partly under current Pella. People who live there know that if their house burns down, is flattened by an earthquake, etc., they may get compensated, but for sure they're moving. The government will not let them rebuild, period.
Archaeology is also just plain slow. You can't just do it with a bulldozer. Not only must you take the time to sift through every bit of dirt for artifacts, but you have to record carefully where each one was found and in what position, etc., because these things reveal significant information too. And that's before you even start trying to fit pieces of pottery, for instance, back together into whole pots. So - they've dug out maybe 40 per cent of the agora (the city square and market area) and a few blocks since 1957 when archaeologists first located, by chance, the city. The vast majority of it is unexcavated. The work won't be complete in our lifetimes.
Pella was founded by the Makedonian king Archelaos, an ancestor of Alexander, around the turn of the fifth century BCE into the fourth. To the north on a gentle rise he had a palace built, in which both Philip and Alexander grew up, and the playwright Euripides penned The Bacchae and other late plays as a guest of Archelaos. The city sat on a slight slope looking out over the Makedonian plain.
Pella was built as a hippodamian grid - a perfect array of arrow-straight streets and rectangular blocks placed symmetrically around a central, huge, agora. It had systems both for water supply and sewage. Afterwards, as I maneuvered my car through yet another crazy-angled corner or maze of tiny side-streets or higgledy-piggledy five or six road crossroads in a tiny Greek town, I thought, you people could built a city on a grid 2500 years ago. Why can't you do it now? But I digress.
You may feel I've included too many shots of water and sewer system parts and not enough floor-mosaics, but, fact is, everyone takes pics of the mosaics and no one takes pics of the sewers, and I think it's cool that Pella had such a good water supply and sewer drainage system. You want to see mosaic pics, better than mine or Melissa's, you can Google "Pella mosaics."
The whole agora was ringed by one big square stoa (covered walkway). I had never understood why covered walkways were so frequent and thus apparently important in ancient Greek architecture. Now that I'm here I totally understand. The number of times Melissa and I have walked down the ruins of a stoa in the blistering sun and wished it still had its roof, I can't tell you.
The site of the palace, the building in which Alexander lived as a child, is closed to the public, so we could only shoot it through the fence. On our second visit (not intentional, but occasioned by the fact that one of our two-person party whose name I will not mention, but was not Melissa, forgot her passport in Edessa so that we had to swing back there) we asked the staff at the museum how we might get in, and she said we'd have to talk to the bigwigs way in advance. I think with enough determination and by using every bit of credibility and pull we've got (Melissa's association with the American School in Athens helps) we could do it for the next time we're here (we're already planning) -- but it may not be necessary.
There is a large, modern and no doubt thoroughly air-conditioned new museum being built between the city and the palace, since the current one is sitting on a place where they know there's stuff to dig up, and when it opens presumably the palace site will be opened too. We asked a staff member at the current museum when that will be, and he said it's up in the air. I think that would be a fairly typical answer, in Greece, to this question. However, they apparently know exactly how much it's going to cost, right down to the Euro-cent: 13,165,957 Euros and 45 Euro-cents. I'd like to know how they can know the cost so precisely and the timing not at all.
Meanwhile Pella, with its arrow-straight streets, sewage pithoi and evenly-sized foundation-stones, waits to reveal all its secrets.
