Sample Chapter from ‘Hidden History’
The Lost City of Helike (cont.)
In 1988 the Helike Project was formed to locate the lost city, but a 1988 sonar survey under their auspices revealed no trace beneath the sea. Consequently, Director of the Helike Project, archaeologist Dora Katsonopoulou, and Dr. Steven Soter, of the American Museum of Natural History, decided to investigate the coastal plain. In 2001, a few metres beneath the mud and gravel, the team discovered ruins of Classical buildings, which turned out to be the remains of the city of Helike destroyed by the earthquake of 373 BC.
The location of the ruins lay almost a kilometre inland from the shore, which explains why no-one had found them beneath the sea. Analyses of the microscopic organisms preserved in the layer of fine dark clay covering the buildings revealed that the site had been drowned by a shallow inland lagoon, which had subsequently silted up. The discovery of sea shells and the possible remains of seaweed on the site are evidence that Helike’s ruins were probably at one time beneath the sea.
The remains of one Classical building graphically illustrated the fate of the city. One of its walls had collapsed in a seaward direction, clear evidence to support destruction by the backwash of a giant wave. Amongst finds of demolished walls, pottery fragments, and terracotta idols, the excavators found a mint silver coin with a representation of Apollo wearing a laurel wreath, cast in the neighbouring town of Sikyon, a few decades before the earthquake struck.
The sad fate of this once great Classical city is thought by many to have been the inspiration for the legend of Atlantis, first recorded by Athenian philosopher Plato a few years after the Helike earthquake, in 360 B.C. A BBC Horizon documentary ‘Helike – The Real Atlantis’, made in 2002 makes this claim for the site. See the chapter on Atlantis for the validity of Helike’s claim for the renowned title.
The area around ancient Helike is one of the most seismically active in Europe, and at least four thousand years of ancient settlements on the site have flourished and been destroyed by earthquakes. So it is hardly surprising that the ancient city was the centre of a cult dedicated to Poseidon, god of earthquakes. In August 1817, an earthquake preceded by a sudden explosion, destroyed five villages in the plain where Helike once stood. In 1861, 13km of coastline sunk about 1.8m, and a 182 meter-wide coastal belt of coast was submerged beneath the Gulf. In June 1995, while the Helike Project team were working in the area, an earthquake of 6.2 on the Richter struck, killing ten people in the adjacent town of Aigion, and demolishing a hotel in modern Eliki, killing sixteen.
Dr. Steven Soter collected many descriptions of odd events preceding this quake, which have overtones of the ancient accounts of the earthquake which destroyed Helike. People heard fierce winds when the air was still outside, dogs howled unaccountably, there were subterranean explosions, strange lights in the sky, red glows, and fireballs. Huge numbers of octopuses were seen by local fishermen and, the night before the earthquake, numerous dead mice were found on the road, all of which had been run over by cars while trying to make their escape into the mountains.