Sample Chapter from ‘Hidden History’
The Lost City of Helike (cont.)
These incidents are reminiscent of the behaviour of animals in the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami that struck Sri Lanka, southern India and Thailand, caused by a huge 9.15 Richter earthquake in the Indian Ocean. In Sri Lanka, where tens of thousands of people lost their lives, animals appear to have fled inland before the tsunami struck. Even though the tsunami caused a heavy loss of human life in the area of Yala National Park, Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve, no dead animals were found. Experts believe that animals possess a sixth sense with which they are able to sense a natural disaster; this is certainly suggested by their behaviour before the Helike earthquakes.
One of the most significant finds from the Helike excavations was of paving stones from what was probably a Classical road. The archaeologists from the Helike Project now hope that following this road will lead them nearer to the heart of the ancient site. However, in terms of finding more complete remains of the Classical city, there is the important question of whether such an immensely destructive tsunami would have left anything behind for the archaeologists to find. Nevertheless, the team from the Helike Project are still confident that the major part of the city will still be located.
Someone who would certainly have supported this belief was the late Spyridon Marinatos, discoverer of the prehistoric town of Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini. One of the earliest modern searchers for the lost city, Marinatos once speculated that hoards of bronze and marble Classical sculptures could lay entombed in the ruins of the city, and fully expected the discovery of an ancient town surpassing even the archaeological riches of Pompeii.
Apart from the constant danger of further earthquakes in the area, the Helike Project now faces a further threat to the site. In Roman times a road running from Corinth, about 90 km east of Helike, to the city of Patras in the west, passed through Helike. Traces of this road have recently been found in excavations by the Project. Recently, the Greek National Railway begun laying a new rail line which will connect Athens with Patras. Trains are currently operating on this railway as far as Corinth, and the line is expected to reach Patras by 2010.
At the moment the route of this rail line is scheduled to run right through the centre of the ancient site, probably in the next two or three years. Thus the remains of ancient Helike will be destroyed before excavations have had the chance to uncover what would surely be priceless evidence of life in prehistoric and Classical Greece.
In order to help protect this important archaeological site from destruction by the railway, the World Monuments Fund has included Helike in its ‘List of 100 Most Endangered Sites’. But land along the coast in the region where the Project plans to excavate is being developed fast, and Dora Katsonopoulou has appealed to the Greek Ministry of Culture to make the area an archaeological zone where new construction is forbidden.
Unfortunately, at present, the Greek Archaeological Service and the Greek Ministry of Culture have not acknowledged the importance of the site. Hopefully the significance of the excavations will be realised before it’s too late, and the lost city of Helike will not become lost for a second time.