Aigai
Αιγές
Interesting facts
- The golden larnax that held the king's bones is made of 24-carat gold and weighs about 11 kilograms.
- The gold wreath found inside it has 313 oak leaves and 68 acorns and weighs 717 grams.
- The Great Tumulus, about 12 metres high, was probably heaped up after Gallic raids in the 270s BC, possibly by Antigonus Gonatas, to shield the tombs from looters.
- To reach the facade of the royal tomb in 1977, excavators removed some 60,000 cubic metres of earth from the mound.
- Of the 51 Macedonian tombs known before 1977, 50 had already been robbed, which made the intact royal tomb such a sensation.
- For years scholars debated whether the tomb held Philip II or his son Philip III Arrhidaeus; refined bone analysis has favoured Philip II.
- A gold casket in the antechamber held the cremated bones of a woman, wrapped in cloth and accompanied by a gold diadem.
- The first excavations at Vergina were carried out in 1861 by the French archaeologist Léon Heuzey, funded by Napoleon III.
- The tomb attributed to Queen Eurydice was robbed in 2001, when seven marble figurines were stolen from it.
Why it is worth it
Beneath a grassy mound about 100 metres across, near the village of Vergina in northern Greece, lie the tombs of the Macedonian royal house. In 1977 the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos dug into this Great Tumulus and found four tombs, two of them untouched since antiquity. One held a solid gold casket stamped with a radiant star, now known as the Vergina Sun, together with a gold wreath and the cremated bones of a man whose injuries match those recorded for Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.
The tomb attributed to Philip has two chambers under a barrel vault, and its facade carries a hunting scene painted across 5.6 metres, thought to be the work of the painter Philoxenos of Eretria. A smaller cist tomb nearby is decorated with a fresco of Hades carrying off Persephone dating from the third quarter of the fourth century BC. A third, the so-called Prince's Tomb, held the bones of a boy of about thirteen in a silver vessel, often identified as Alexander IV, the son of Alexander the Great. Since 1993 the tombs have been shown in place inside a museum built over them, which leaves them where they were found.
Aigai was the old royal city of the Macedonian kings. Its palace, built by Philip II in the mid-fourth century BC and measuring roughly 104 by 88 metres, was organised around a great courtyard with Doric columns and surrounded by banqueting halls, and it is counted among the largest buildings of classical Greece. Nearby lay the theatre where Philip was assassinated in 336 BC during the wedding celebrations of his daughter Cleopatra, the event that brought Alexander to the throne. Beyond the city stretches a cemetery of more than 500 burial mounds, extending over 3 km, some of them dating back to the eleventh century BC. Another tomb, with a marble throne and dated to around 340 BC, has been identified as that of Queen Eurydice, Philip's mother. The archaeological site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996.
Getting there
Vergina lies in Central Macedonia; the nearest city is Veria, about 11 km away, the municipality to which Vergina belongs. The nearest airport is Kozani National Airport (KZI), about 46 km away; the larger Thessaloniki Airport (SKG) serves the region with international flights.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Aegae or Aigai was the original capital of Macedon, the ancient Greek kingdom of the Argead Makedones in Lower Macedonia. Aigai was located in the Haliacmon valley on the foothills of the Pierian Mountains, between the modern towns of Vergina and Palatitsia, overlooking the central Macedonian plain, in northern Greece. Alexander the Great was proclaimed king of Macedon at Aigai when his father Philip II was assassinated at the city's theatre.
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