Greek Travels & Palamari, a Lost City

My post this week is about the ruins of Palamari on the island of Skyros. Besides sharing an adventure in ancient Greek archaeology as I often do on this blog, this topic will also serve as a bit of cross pollination. If you are a reader of my website blog, you may also be a subscriber to my author newsletter. But you might not be. I put together this piece for my pre-Thanksgiving author newsletter. If you aren’t subscribed to the author newsletter but, reading this, think you’d like to be, then you may wish to go to the sign up page for the Author Newsletter. Signing up will, by the way, gift you an ebook copy of my griffin novella, The Scent of Slaughter and Love.

Impressive Ruins at Palamari

Recently on this blog, I wrote about my travels to Skyros and discussed its missing Mycenaean palace. That long-gone Mycenaean palace is important to the novel I’m working on. However, on the island of Skyros, the dramatic, excavated archaeological ruins are at a site called Palamari. They lie on a low coastal bluff on the northeastern tip of Skyros.

For a thousand years (2700 to 1700 BCE), a city rose and thrived on this windy perch above the crystal Aegean. Wide, stone-paved streets crisscrossed the settlement, crowded with homes and workshops. Impressive public buildings communicated the wealth and prominence of this city.

Palamari’s Distinctive Fortifications around a Thriving Early Bronze Age City

Early on, the inhabitants built massive fortifications with horseshoe-shaped bastions scalloping their thick stone walls. (Photo above) Archaeologists call this style of bastion the “kastri” type after the archaeological site where they first excavated them. This fortification style arose at many locations across the Mediterranean during the Early Bronze Age. That was a long before the time when my mythical Princess Deidamia might have lived on Skyros.

The ever-increasing need for copper and tin to make bronze drove the development of trade routes. The storage and fabrication of these valuable metals meant they had to protect the major stops on that route from pirates. With a lovely wide bay and a sheltered lagoon for ships, a nurturing stream and abundant springs, flat inland plains for wheat and barley fields, as well as nearby pine forests for timber, this city thrived. Until it was abruptly abandoned.

And Then It Was Gone

The historical record says nothing of this dominating city. We know of it only through the archaeologists’ trowels and brushes. By the time we hear the island of Skyros mentioned, it’s a backward, impoverished place. It’s called the haunt of goatherders and not much else. (This later poverty of the island is integral to my novel.) So what happened?

It isn’t entirely certain, but there’s a likely culprit. I suspect the volcanic eruption on the island of Thera, far to the south. In the excavations of this site, there are no signs of habitation after 1700 BCE, which is roughly when Thera blew up. The cities on Thera were completely buried, and tidal waves destroyed Crete’s coastal cities in a single blow. Further north, on Skyros, a large chunk of the city was consumed by the sea. Note the eroded portion on the model. That process continues to this day, but it is not hard to imagine one monstrous chomp brought on by Thera’s volcanic horror, taking down the mighty wall on one side and fatally wounding the proud city.

Imagining the End

I can imagine the terrified surviving inhabitants fleeing inland away from the threat of another wall of water. The ensuing collapse of Minoan influence meant the trade routes waned for a time and shifted, leaving Skyros as a backwater. When later a hero-king of legend founds a new kingdom on the island (grandfather of the king in my novel), he builds not on those haunted ruins, whatever state they might have been in by then, but on the highly defensible top of a mountain, a smaller scope for a palace and town. The grandeur of Early Bronze Age Skyros was lost forever.

Standing amid the ruins, in that evocative sea-girt place of dramatic bastions, walls, and moats, I found myself saddened almost to tears, imagining the busy, thriving people who once lived there.

Finding Palamari a Place in My Fiction

Although the city would have lain in ruins by the time of my characters—five hundred or so years later—I think I will have them confront and incorporate into their understanding of their roles in life the fallen, cut stones and sense of loss that haunts this place. It matches the inner processes that both must go through. Exploring the archaeological site of Palamari offered one of the richest experiences of exploring the sun-filled island of Skyros.