Peloponnese Guide: Ancient Lerna

Lerna

The site, open Tues-Sun, 8:30am-3pm; 2 euros.

Lerna is 10km south of Argos and 12km from Nafplio by the lesser road via Nea Kios; and is near the village of Myli (below right), on a narrow strip of land between the road and the sea on which are found the Hydra Springs and the Lerna Marshes. The site is surrounded by orange trees is a rather idyllic spot. A warden is posted there, his reverie interrupted by few visitors, though he might show you around if you ask.  

According to ancient myth, the second labor of Iraklis (Hercules) was slaying the nine-headed Hydra, a water snake that lived in the marshes near Lerna, whose heads kept growing back as soon as they were cut off. Curiously, there are marshes near this ancient site replete with huge eels, and it has been suggested by some that this myth could symbolize an unsuccessful attempt to drain the marsh. The ancient Greeks believed the Lerna marshes bottomless and that they were an entrance to the underworld. The Danaids, after killing their husbands, threw their heads in the marsh. Certainly the common element of beheading in both the Hercules myth and that of the Danaids (especially in relation to these marshes) is interesting.

Lerna is one of Greece's most important Bronze Age sites, and also where ruins of a Neolithic house and very intact fortification walls were found during during excavations carried out by Americans during the 1950s.

Inhabited from as early as 5500 BC (according to some, though others put the dates in the fourth or third millennium) it is also one of the Greece's most ancient settlements.

A second large house on the north end of the site is thought to have been a palace, but the much larger House of Tiles seems to have superceded it (circled in site plan left).

The latter, measuring about 24meters by 9meters a takes its name from the large quantity of terracotta roof tiles found inside, fallen during a fire that occurred around 2200 BC which is guessed to have been caused either by lightning or by enemy raiders setting it ablaze.

A third 'first' for the site is in the use of terracotta as a building material (as there is no record of earlier such use anywhere in Greece), and yet a fourth is that the structure is the most impressive pre-Helladic structure found on the Greek mainland.

The layout is a symmetrical arrangement of smaller rooms with larger ones in the interior, with stairs leading to what was once a second storey. The foundations were stone, the thick walls made of sun-dried brick (well preserved by being baked in the fire that destroyed the structure), and originally covered with plaster. It appears that, even after the destruction of the building, it still kept some significance.

Two Mycenaean shaft graves were dug into the ruins around 1600BC, and only at the end of the Mycenaean period (around 1250BC) was the site finally abandoned. The chronology of this site indicates that it was not established or inhabited by Greeks. There are some similarities in architecture and sculpture with those of Anatolia in present times, but no conclusions have yet been drawn as to who these people were. That they were traders, however, is certain, their trade including the Aegean area and up into the Balkan peninsula. They raised livestock, for wool and hides as well as for food, and grew all of the staple crops grown in the Argolid. Terracotta was used also in beautiful soup bowls and spoons, housed in the Argos Archaeological Museum.