Hellanion Oros, Aigina - 2024

Aigina - Hellanion Oros. Stella Chrysoulaki (Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and islands) and Tobias Krapf (ESAG), Leonidas Bokotopoulos – Sophia Michalopoulou – Jérôme André (University of Lausanne), report on the fourth season of a five-year project on Hellanion Oros in Aigina, a synergasia between the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and islands and ESAG.

The aim in 2024 was to integrate the site at the summit of Mount Ellanion into its surrounding landscape through survey and excavation. Work was completed in the west, where the slopes around the plateau with the old olive grove were investigated. The research then focused on the area around the abandoned village of Kanakides and the neighboring Late Mycenaean fortification of Megali Koryfi. During the survey, two new prehistoric sites were discovered. The presence of pottery from the end of the Neolithic and/or the beginning of the Early Bronze Age on a rocky peak west of Mount Ellanion indicates that the earliest settlement of the area was located there. Settlement on steep, naturally fortified outcrops was particularly widespread in the southern Aegean islands between the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. Another area with contemporary flat and broad dry-stone walls, near the village of Vlachides, between Mount Ellanion and Megali Koryfi, appears to have been inhabited for a long time, at least since Mycenaean times.