Kerameikos Museum
(Ermou 148, Athens)The Kerameikos Museum is located at the end of Ermou Street, in the SW. side of the fence of the archaeological site. It is a small one-story building with 4 rooms and an inner courtyard, built with a donation from Gustav Oberlander, to house the findings of the German excavations at Kerameikos, which began after 1927. In the first room, marble tomb statues are exhibited, reliefs, as well as bases of statues or columns, on the left side the archaic, on the right the classical works.
All the archaic funerary sculptures of the Museum (statues, bas-reliefs or columns) were found built as building material in the Themistocleian wall, which proves the speed with which this great fortification project of ancient Athens was built. Most important are the mid-6th century mid-sixth-century porina stele of a man with a sword and staff, the Archaic sphinx, which was the capstone of another tombstone, a magnificent head of a bearded hoplite from a funerary relief, a kuru trunk, as well as many inscribed and bas-reliefs of statues.
Of the classical works, notable are the funerary reliefs of a woman with a mirror (420 BC), of Ampharete holding her grandson (400 BC), and of the athlete Euphiros with Ionic influences (around 420 BC .X.). But the most beautiful is of Dexileos, the 20-year-old youth who fell "for his country" in a battle near Corinth in 394/3 BC. And his ashes were placed in the public tomb that the city established for all the fallen, but his relatives made him a special cenotaph, which they decorated with this beautiful relief.
In the second room, figurines and vases of the Sub-Mycenaean, Proto-Geometric, Geometric and Proto-Attic periods (11th - 7th century BC) are exhibited, which come from the tombs of the cemetery. In rooms 3 and 4 there are burial ensembles from the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods, which include black-figure and red-figure vases by well-known painters (Amasis, Cleopatra), clay figurines, as well as a selection of Panathenaic amphora shells found in Pompeii, where the " prizes" before they are awarded to the winners.
Editor: Fotini Anastasopoulou