Ruins and Landscapes – The Bays of East Attica Regional Survey

January 23, 2022January 23, 2022

The Islet of Modi

A curious aspect of the LH IIIC archaeological record around south and central Greece is the frequent appearance of settlement remains on small offshore islets that (at least superficially) do not offer a very hospitable place for people to live. In our view Raftis islet in Porto Rafti bay was probably the site of a substantial residential settlement in spite of its steeply sloping landscape, lack of an obvious harbour, and absence of available drinking water. But it is just one of many such islands, and it’s clear we’re unlikely to understand the ‘enigma of Bronze Age Raftis’ without considering it within the context of comparable sites from the same period.

One such site is located on the islet of Modi, just off the southeastern coast of the delightful island of Poros in the southwestern Saronic Gulf. In 1999, LH IIIC remains of two building complexes on Modi were excavated by the erstwhile 2nd Ephorate under the leadership of Eleni Konsolaki-Yannopoulou; additional walls and structures were evident on the slopes of the islet, suggesting it (like Raftis) was densely settled. The cargo of an apparent LH IIIC shipwreck was subsequently located off its northern coast and explored by Christos Agouridis and a team from the Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology. The cargo includes a large number of hydriae, which seem to have been used as transport containers.

Given the islet’s position on an important sea route (the ferry from Athens to Poros still passes right under its nose), it’s not entirely surprising to find material remains there. However, as gnarly as the slopes of Raftis might seem, Modi’s extremely extreme goblin castle landscape makes it look as tame as a manicured golf course! Modi is also referred to as Liontari, because when viewed from certain angles it looks like the profile of a lion sitting in repose.

I had always been intrigued by reports from the work on and around Modi. However, I had never seen the island, or the material from the excavation which is on display in the Poros museum, until a recent trip down to the southern Argolid last week. It was definitely worth the drive – Modi looks even more improbable as a site for human settlement in person than it does in photos!

The finds in the museum are likewise very interesting to see in three dimensions. They suggest some intriguing connections with Porto Rafti bay. For example, a fancy large krater seems to be made of the White Ware fabric that we now know was being made on Praso and that is abundant on Raftis and in the Perati cemetery. Both the Perati cemetery and Modi have produced examples of pictorial pottery with depictions of human beings, which is not exactly widespread in the LH IIIC period. The finds of a strange wooden box with maybe Egyptianizing motifs added in bone inlays and a piece of a copper ingot on Modi suggest the same kinds of long-distance commercial and cultural connections observable in Porto Rafti’s material culture, too.

We can still only speculate about the nature of life on Modi in the Bronze Age, or why this site seemed an appealing spot to settle down, but we can probably bet that the community there was in touch with the Bronze Age folks in Porto Rafti, and maybe those living on other small islets in the area too. With any luck we’ll have additional insight into small islet life in the LH IIIC period by the end of our little survey project in a few years’ time!

July 26, 2021February 3, 2024

Phantom Threads: The Raftis and its Port

The archaeology of Porto Rafti bay is top shelf, as the BEARS project demonstrates every time we wander out into the field. From the delectable obsidian debitage gravel pit that is the Pounta peninsula to the delightfully abundant and surprisingly diverse array of Koroni tiles, not to mention one of the more interesting human coastal ecosystems known in the entirety of Greece for the LH IIIC period, and a smorgasbord of Roman dinner-party pots on small islands, it’s got something for everyone!

Of course, as an archaeologist devoting many years to work and study in the bay, I’m not exactly an impartial source for such an opinion. But I think it’s not too controversial. Anyway, in just two short seasons with a pretty small team, the project has already generated a huge amount of new material and exciting conclusions. We have a ton of stuff to study and think about ahead of putting together a complete publication over the next several years, which is going to be so much fun.

The one aspect of the archaeology of Porto Rafti that I do not care about at all, really whatsoever, is the Raftis statue that gives the bay its name. Our project has a lot of goals, but saying or doing anything related to the Raftis statue is not exactly a priority: surely plenty has been said and done about that beaten up lump of marble already. As is well known by now, the statue does not actually represent a tailor, and is not male – most agree that it represents a female goddess, perhaps Demeter, that it was originally carved in the 2nd century CE, and that it was moved to its current location sometime after that.

Basically every traveler who came near Porto Rafti prior to the 20th century mentions something about the statue; apparently it was one of the main attractions that drew people to the bay back when archaeology mostly involved travelling around Greece looking at stones left over from antiquity. Even as late as the 1960s and 1970s special expeditions were formed in order to assess the burning questions of what the statue represents, where it came from, and the particularities of its aesthetic merits:

“Notwithstanding the damage, the statue has many points of aesthetic power and forceful beauty. The posture still evokes a feeling of formal majesty, and the view of the right side shows the rhythmical transitions from cloak to body to rockwork seat and plinth, conveyed in the bunching of drapery and the depth of cutting.” (Vermeule, 1962: 63)

Oh yeah: Forceful beauty! Formal majesty! Rhythmical transitions! I am not sure I see all of that in the old lump, but I’ll leave that for the art historians to decide. Let’s just say the work we are doing in the BEARS project is not so wrapped up in formal majesty or rhythmical transitions.

That said, some extant stories from the history of peoples’ attempts to answer questions of what the statue represents and where it came from are pretty amusing, and also shed interesting light on the history of post-antique activity in Porto Rafti.

In 1740, some locals apparently told Charles Perry of Penshurst that Apollo granted a particularly competent tailor the honor of the statue when he “reigned King of Greece”…whenever that was. The idea of the statue as a tailor therefore goes back at least into the 18th century, and probably earlier. A common story is that the statue once held a pair of golden scissors, since stolen.

But there are totally different, and probably earlier origin myths for the monument. According to Niccolò da Martoni, who was in Porto Rafti way back in 1395, the local story of the statue concerned a young man who fell in love with a beautiful girl uninterested in his advances. The girl ran away; despairing during the pursuit, she asked the gods to intervene. The gods turned both the young man and the girl into marble, then set them up on two nearby islands – hence the names of Raftis and Raftopoula. This story corroborates other accounts, including those of Guillet (ca. 1670), Perry (1740), and Stuart and Revett (1753) who saw two marble statues in the bay.

What happened to the other statue? The letters of John Morritt dated between 1794 and 1796 describe the activities of Louis Fauvel, a French painter who collected large quantities of antiquities with which to decorate his house and that of his patron (the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier), in the general area. A plausible suggestion brought forward by Vermeule is that Fauvel made off with the statue from Raftopoula during a general looting tour of Attica.

And the poor old Raftis statue’s head? According to Collignon’s summary of the French consul Giraud’s correspondence from the late 17th century, a nasty Venetian ship captain whacked it off for a souvenir sometime around 1673! Such drama, such intrigue. By the way, Collignon wrote a really fascinating account of 17th-century Porto Rafti based on Giraud’s letters: apparently there was a booming nut export business going then, as well as outgoing shipments of Attic resin, honey, and silk. Many distinguished foreign consuls and merchants were in residence, and had various disputes over taxes with local sailors and officials. Clearly a lot had changed by the time of Dodwell’s visit in 1805, when the entire area was abandoned!

One thing that the old accounts agree on is that the statue was used as a lighthouse to keep sailors from smashing into the Raftis islet at night, which is cool. I can imagine that this big marble figure with a sort of Headless Horseman flame head lurking atop the pyramid of Raftis would have looked very very extra!

When it comes to any of the other questions about the Raftis, where the statue came from or who put it there, most of the accounts related to the statue are impossible to corroborate, and several contradict each other, so it seems very unlikely that additional efforts to enlighten its background would be fruitful. Of course, there’s always more room for idle speculation, but maybe that’s not the best use of BEARS’ time. It is helpful that the statue has been there drawing travelers to the bay for hundreds of years, since their other comments give us interesting accounts of what the bay was like a long time ago. Too bad they didn’t know how to read surface pottery, or we’d also have a better idea of the extent of ancient settlement in the area too.

December 5, 2020December 7, 2020

A Day Out on Raftis Island

Greece is a land of many islands, large and small, but is there any that is better than our own Raftis island? I think not. Maybe it is lacking in some categories of attraction, like the hottest clubs, sandy beaches, a bustling cultural scene, traditional yet commodious guesthouses, exquisite fish tavernas, etc. But what it lacks in mod cons, Raftis amply makes up with its unique rustic charm, retina-burning orange lichens, steep slopes covered in loose scree, and spiders of extraordinary size. Join us here at BEARS blog, if you will, on a guided tour of Raftis island, designed for the curious armchair traveler who is probably spending a lot of time sitting in front of a computer screen right now.

While some of the fancier islands in the Aegean feature advanced infrastructural improvements, such as airports and ferry terminals, for facilitating travelers’ arrival en masse, visitors to Raftis will need to reach the island through independent means. Usually we’d recommend a boat, but swimming is a possibility for the very physically fit and/or those short on cash. Either way, you’ll need to get permission from the harbour masters at the Porto Rafti port before you set off, since the island is a protected heritage site. Usually I have found that vacations do not benefit materially from time spent in the local jail, although sometimes a brief detention can serve as the basis of amusing cocktail party banter several years after the prison brawl bruises have healed.

Your initial impressions of Raftis will vary with your chosen direction of attack. From the southern, Koroniward side, the approach provides stellar views of the dramatic cliffs and steep slopes that dominate the southern side of the island. There are often fishing boats parked off the island on this side, as I believe the shelter from northern winds and currents provided by its mass produces calm waters favored by local sea creatures. Either that or the fishermen think the cliffs look as cool as I do. The very steep slopes on the southwest part of the island seem like a terrible candidate for a rich archaeological context, but they are surprisingly covered in Mycenaean pottery. The caves in the cliffs further east are mostly full of bird droppings, on the other hand.

If you approach Raftis from either the west or the northwest, you will find the island to appear perfectly pyramidal in shape, even moreso than that other more famous “pyramid” island with an archaeological site on it. Though some have suggested that Raftis is too small and steep to have hosted a major settlement, there is plenty of architecture on those northern slopes! You can actually see the lumpen berm of soil that has accumulated behind the big circumvallating wall that marks the perimeter of the island in the photos above and below. It’s not exactly a monumental fortification or anything, and it may have served mainly as a terracing feature to prevent soil from the slopes from eroding into the sea. But it was certainly built by human hands.

From the north Raftis looks more like a partially submerged horseshoe crab than like a pyramid, which is pretty cool, if you ask me. In the photo above you can see a little tourist pontoon boat full of swimmers who are probably thinking also about how much the island looks like a horseshoe crab.

The coast of the island is not particularly stable, and the western and southern sides are characterized by small cliffs that appear to be the result of recent coastal collapse, as indicated by sizeable, fresh piles of rocks, dirt, pottery, and boulders below. The nature of these landforms may suggest that there were once easier approaches to the island from multiple directions, but as things stand now, the only really reasonably place to make a landing is a small cove on the western side of the island, just to the left of the fuzzy light green vegetation visible in the photo of the shore below. I’m not sure if there are more options for the swimmer, but someone with stronger aquatic skills might be able to check it out and let us know sometime!

Once a visitor alights on the island, there are a lot of excellent options for entertainment. The most popular of these is probably a bold ascent to the top of the “pyramid” in order to visit the island’s only permanent anthropomorphic inhabitant, the larger-than-life Raftis (tailor) statue after which the island gets its name.

Depending on your capacity for clambering up steep slopes covered in loose stones and dense vegetation, the climb to the top only takes about 5–10 minutes. I’ve even seen it done in beach attire, so you need not worry about gearing up from the Orvis catalog in order to visit Mr. or Mrs. Raftis. Some visitors report the presence of a substantial population of supernaturally large spiders along the route, but visits throughout the year suggest that this is a seasonal issue. By August, when many Europeans take their island vacations, most of the fat, eight-legged Raftis residents seem to have died off or gone into hiding at their own alternative holiday destinations. Other faunal hazards include a number of fuzzy bunnies, a known nemesis to Greek hikers everywhere.

After a modest climb, a visitor will see the Raftis statue looming large on the horizon. Upon achieving the summit, a popular activity is to try to solve the great mystery of the Raftis with your traveling companions. For the ancient sculpture buff, this would involve guessing whether the statue was originally supposed to depict a male or a female, and/or deciding which god or goddess it might represent. If that doesn’t get your engine started, additional topics of controversy include: what the heck is this big Roman statue doing on a tiny island anyway? Who put it there and where did it originally come from? Who took its head, arms, and legs, and chopped the poor guy/gal up? What did he/she do to deserve such a treatment? Why is it called a Raftis? What would a Greek island vacation be without an opportunity to ponder such thrilling mysteries of history?

Once you’ve exhausted these debates, having gazed deep into the intellectual void within, why not take a moment to look outward and enjoy the view? To the north is a perfect coastal Aegean scene including the Perati mountain and Raftopoula in the foreground and Hymettos further afield, while to the east on a clear day the vista includes Mt Ochi on Euboea and several Aegean islands, including Makronisos and Tzia in the distance.

When it is hot outside, the area below the plinth of the statue provides a welcome place to take a break in the shade, and a motley assemblage of beer cans, cigarette butts, and snack wrappers suggests that many travelers have availed themselves of this option in recent years. On the BEARS project we rarely have time to indulge in such leisure activities, and when we do we surely do not leave our detritus around to provide any incriminating evidence. Instead, we pass most of our hours on the island wandering the slopes and staring intently at the ground, as you might expect of a group of dirty survey archaeologists spending so much time on a lump of territory that is pretty much covered in ancient pottery.

But wait, there’s more than just pottery on these slopes! Raftis offers opportunities for the amateur naturalist to appreciate the many different kinds of plants that flourish even in a relatively inhospitable Aegean maritime environment like this little windswept island. Wandering around the island, a person will encounter a variety of flowers that may or may not be in bloom, depending on the season. Summertime flora come June and July include various kinds of bindweed (aka convulvulacaea) and several flowering herbaceous sage species. In the springtime the island is thick with wild fennel plants and several kinds of asphodels, the spiny dead skeletons of which present an obstacle to thorough ground cover on our survey later in the summer, while at the same time helping us out by providing good places to tie the flags denoting the limits of our grid units. If you are planning to enjoy a fresh summer salad during your visit to the island, you’ll be sure to appreciate the presence of ample wild caper plants, especially noticeable on the steep southern slopes, where the wind can’t rip their delicate trailing stems all to shreds.

More substantial plant life exists in the form of small phrygana and wild olive trees and shrubberies that pepper the north and northwest slopes. These little trees seem to prefer growing over the remains of ancient buildings or structures, and thus hold many ancient secrets within. A lot of the best preserved finds from the survey on Raftis so far have been pulled from amongst the shelter of their roots.

Otherwise, in the summer you’ll most often be surrounded by tall, dead grasses during your visit, as Joey demonstrates here.

Perhaps the most exciting and visually pleasing natural feature of the island is the very bright crustose orange lichen that grows all over the rocks on the north slope. I refer to this stuff informally as Disco Lichen, but science tells me that it’s actually called Orange Sea Lichen (Caloplaca marina). Even some of our artifactual finds from this sector of Raftis are covered in fluorescent dayglo Disco Lichen, which is pretty fun, you have to admit. Eat your heart out, clubs of Mykonos!

Once you’ve seen Disco Lichen, you’ll probably be too emotionally exhausted to press onward with any more excitement for the day, and this would be the time to descend back down the slope, through the dead fennel stalks and windblown grasses, to your means of conveyance. As you voyage across the bay to return to the mainland once again, I recommend reflecting upon the successes and failures of your life, and the way that your visit to the majestic Land of Raftis really puts all of that petty stuff into perspective.

This concludes our virtual tour of a day out on Raftis island. As you’ll no doubt agree by this point, Raftis really has it all! Just remember when it’s hitting the European Travel Top Ten Lists – you heard it here first.