The History Room
A lost ancient city built by Trojan War captives has been found, Greek officials say
This is a neat find: a city built by POWs from the Trojan wars.
Mention the Trojan War and what may first come to mind is the oft-told tale of Helen, wife of Sparta's King Menelaus and possessor of a divinely bestowed beauty, falling in love with Paris of Troy. Their supposed affair and her subsequent abduction from Sparta sparked a 10-year Greek siege of Troy that would shape Greek civilization for centuries to come - at least according to Greek mythology.
Now fast-forward about three millennia.
For the past several years, archaeologist Elena Korka has been focused on a far less romantic but more concrete legacy of the Trojan War: A lost city named Tenea, reportedly settled by war prisoners brought over from Troy.
Tenea enjoyed an ideal location to the south of the bustling ancient port of Corinth, on the narrow strip of land connecting Greek's mainland and its Peloponnesian peninsula. Against the odds, the city of outsiders "prospered more than the other settlements, and finally even had a government of its own," the Greek philosopher Strabo once wrote.
As legend has it, when the Romans invaded Corinth in 146 B.C. - ultimately destroying the city and beginning their takeover of Greece - Tenea was left unharmed. Still, even Tenea eventually crumbled and disappeared, shadowed in the history books by more consequential ancient metropolises.
For decades, very periodic archaeological finds teased modern-day scholars with evidence of Tenea's existence: An exquisite marble statue of a young man, known as the Kouros of Tenea, was discovered in 1846, just south of Corinth. A sarcophagus containing the skeletal remains of what had been a high-society woman was unearthed in 1984, where Tenea was thought to have stood.
In 2013, Korka and a team surveyed a site in the area and, encouraged by pottery and other small finds, began excavating.
"The concentration of ceramics and architectural remains ... were the reasons that led us to the excavation of the site," Korka said in a guest lecture at New York University last year. "Our ultimate goal was not just the unearthing of [an ancient theater purported to be there] but rather the discovery of evidence which would help us to find remains of the settlement of ancient Tenea."
The excavation produced some extraordinary artifacts. Last year, the Greek Ministry of Culture announced that the team had found a trove of riches while digging up what had been a dual-chambered burial ground at the Tenea site, as Newsweek reported:
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Originally Posted by Standing Wolf
