Route 4: Elliniko

Quarry

An extensive quarry of the classical period, with conglomerate rock, was uncovered within the former Elliniko airport. In the quarry, which lay inside the grounds of the former airport, a hoard of 47 bronze coins was found.

Funerary monument of Elliniko

Within the airport perimeter, but at a higher level than the stream bed, fragmentary sections of walls built of large ashlar blocks were uncovered in the early 1960s; they probably belonged to a funerary enclosure.

Cemetery at the Elliniko tram depot

Some 300 m west of the cemetery of the Elliniko Air Base, an important cemetery dating from the 8^th – 4^th century BC was excavated in 2002–2004. Its importance lies, first, in the fact that an unlooted funerary enclosure with its sculptural decoration in situ was found for the first time since the excavations in the Kerameikos a hundred years earlier and, second, because the palmette stele and the pedimental crowns of the other two stelae bear inscriptions with the names of three members of a family from Euonymon.

Hasani hill

 

Although the form of the hill has been greatly altered by hundreds of tonnes of deposited fill, a low hill still survives today within the boundaries of the Air Base, about 300 m from the cemetery at the tram depot. The abundant ancient traces — the ancient wall along the southern slope, the fragments of clay vessels of the Early Helladic and Classical periods, and the natural and artificial workings on the rock surface — testify to intensive use of the area in antiquity, and perhaps to the existence of a settlement core of ancient Euonymon connected with the cemetery at the tram depot.