A striking 2400-year-old marble relief, showing a mounted warrior defeating an enemy, towers over an ancient roadway. It stands upon a massive terrace that contains the graves of the soldier’s family. Lining the road all around are similar funerary monuments, marking the burial places of his fellow Athenian citizens. The site is the Kerameikos, the vast cemetery of ancient Athens.
Have you come across the term “tombstone tourism”? It may sound odd, but it describes a fairly common phenomenon, namely the visiting of cemeteries during the course of exploring an area or city. A somewhat morbid fringe activity?
Graves as tourist attractions
Not really: Since time immemorial, places of burial have been monumentalised, to preserve the memory of deceased ancestors and to aggrandise their status even after their passing. Graves became landmarks, meant to be seen and noticed, from the Great Pyramids of Egypt, via the Mausoleum, the enormous tomb of Mausollos of Halicarnassus (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), to the vast necropoleis (cemeteries) that lined the streets outside ancient cities. We know of early incidents of travellers looking for the tombs of famous people, such as Alexander the Great participating naked in a footrace at the tomb of Achilles at Troy or Cicero’s rediscovery of the grave of Archimedes at Syracuse. The practice continues today, probably most famously at the Père Lachaise cemetery of Paris, where thousands of visitors every year pay their respects to celebrities like Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde.
Graves are also a frequent focus of archaeological tours. On our own itineraries, we visit not just the Mausoleum, but also the atmospheric ancient cemeteries in Lycia (e.g. on Cruising the Lycian Shore), the Temple Tombs of Kaunos in Caria (along with the Mausoleum, on our Carian cruises), the mysterious Bronze Age necropolis of Pantalica on Sicily (on Exploring Sicily), or the tumulus containing the fallen Athenians of the battle of Marathon (while Exploring Athens). Beyond that, we also examine artefacts recovered from ancient graves at many of the museums on our tours. No wonder – ancient graves are a key source of archaeological material, and more generally, burial habits and burial sites are a central characteristic that helps us understand cultures and societies from prehistory to the present.
One of the most famous and most significant historic cemeteries we visit is the Kerameikos of Athens, a key point on our Exploring Athens tour. The site, at the outskirts of the ancient city but now near the centre of the modern one, is not just of immense archaeological interest but also of great beauty. Absurdly ranked in 81st place among the city’s sights on a review website I have recently poked fun at, it is a must-see, a tranquil oasis in the heart of the metropolis, surprisingly removed from the hustle and bustle all around, traversed by a stream and home to a thriving population of tortoises!
The Wall of Themistocles
Explored for over a century, the Kerameikos falls in two parts, one inside the boundaries of Classical Athens, the other one outside. What separates them is the Themistoclean Wall, itself a major historical monument. As the historian Diodorus reports, after the temporary abandonment of Athens during the second Persian War of 480/479 BC, the Greek allies, led by Sparta, were debating the option of banning Athens from rebuilding its fortifications, so as to prevent a future invader from gaining a stronghold. Under the leadership of Themistocles, Athens sent emissaries instructed to stall negotiations, while a new and expanded set of city walls was created hurriedly and on the sly. The foundations of that wall, repeatedly rebuilt and restored for many centuries, are there to be seen – and excavations have revealed the rushed construction of their initial phase, incorporating many grave monuments that stood in the area previously. A key example of Classical Greek defensive architecture, the wall is pierced within the Kerameikos archaeological area by its two most famous ga