Kerameikos Area index VIDEOPAGES:

Kerameikos is an area of Athens, Greece, located to the northwest of the Acropolis, which includes an extensive area both within and outside the city walls, on both sides of the Dipylon Gate and by the banks of the Eridanos River. It was the potters' quarter of the city, from which the English word "ceramic" is derived, and was also the site of an important cemetery and numerous funerary sculptures erected along the road out of the city.

The area took its name from the city quarter or dēmos of Kerameis, which in turn derived its name from the word κέραμος (keramos, "pottery clay") from which the English word "ceramic" is derived.[1] The "Inner Kerameikos" was the former "potter's quarter" of the city and "Outer Kerameikos" covers the cemetery and also the dēmosion sēma (a public burial monument) where Pericles delivered his funeral oration in 431 BC. The cemetery was also where the Iera Odos (the Sacred Way, i.e. the road to Eleusis) began, along which the procession moved for the Eleusinian Mysteries.

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Archaeological excavations in the Kerameikos began in 1870 under the auspices of the Greek Archaeological Society. They have continued from 1913 to the present day under the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. During the construction of Kerameikos station for the expanded Athens Metro, a plague pit and approximately 1,000 tombs from the 4th and 5th century BC were discovered. Thucydides describes the panic caused by the plague, possibly an epidemic of typhoid which struck the besieged city in 430 BC. The epidemic lasted for two years and killed an estimated one third of the population. He wrote that bodies were abandoned in temples and streets, to be subsequently collected and hastily buried. The disease reappeared in the winter of 427 BC. The Greek archaeologist Efi Baziotopoulou-Valavani, who excavated the site, has dated the grave to between 430 and 426 BC.

Latest findings in the Kerameikos include the excavation of a 2.1 m tall Kouros, a work of the so-called Dipylon sculptor unearthed by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens under the direction of Professor Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier.