Chora was the capital of Naxos during prehistoric and historical times. Important traces of the Mycenaean and historical city of Grotta, in the north of Chora, are exhibited today as part of the On-Site Archaeological Museum in Mitropoleos Square. It is the first museum of this type in Greece and has been operating since 1999. The visitor can, through comprehensible visual means, tour the site and visit the ancient remains in the place where they were found and first excavated. The most important remains include part of the Mycenaean wall of the Grotto and a pottery workshop of the same period, as well as the earthen mound of the Geometric period, which performed hero worship at the burials of the previous inhabitants.
The part of the Mycenaean city preserved in the square of the Metropolis shows that Naxos was already a developed urban center in the 13th-11th centuries. The remains of the next phase at this site belong to a mound, which was formed during early historical times and document a persistent historical memory of the inhabitants of the area.
At the end of the Mycenaean era, the coastal part of the city was deserted, because there was no safety from the sea. The inhabitants, however, buried their important dead in the ruins, which they felt to be their ancestral home, and then worshiped them for 1000 years (9th BC - 1st AD century) in the same place, as ancestral heroes next to the market of of a classical city, which spread out again on the beach. In late Roman times private residences once again covered the previously venerable space.

Editor: Fotini Anastasopoulou