Guide of Eastern Macedonia & Thrace

The Archaeological Museum of Abdera, installed in 2000, includes finds from the excavations at the ancient city and the cemeteries

The exhibition covers a six-century period, from the 7th to the 13th centuries BC. The collection is displayed at the ground floor and the first floor and arranged in three thematic fields: public life, private life and burial customs. There is also rich supervisory material containing texts about mythology, history and archaeological research as well as plans and maps of the wider area supplementing the information that visitors can obtain on the history and the culture of the city.

Notable finds are exhibited in the museum like a mosaic floor from the courtyard of a house with dolphins, lilies and rosettes dating to the 250 – 200 BC; a 2nd century BC clay portrait of an Abderite; a Clazomenian type sarcophagus with the representation of the myth of Troilus dating to the 5th century BC as well as a great number of everyday use vessels, figurines, coins, toilet articles and jewellery dating from the Archaic to the Hellenistic era (Ionian drinking cups, or Kylixes, Corinthian globular flask, or aryballus, glass perfume pots, hydrias, etc)

The finds from the cemeteries are housed in the hall where numerous funerary ash urns are on display together with burial ensembles and funerary monuments, grave goods of the 5th century BC and burials in sarcophagi, inscribed funerary steles and small columns dating from the late 6th to the 2nd centuries BC. There are also two painted sarcophagi of the 5th century BC, items from three neighbouring tumuli dating to the 4th century BC, together with funerary steles and small columns dating from the late 3rd to the 1st centuries BC and three funerary reliefs of the 1st century BC. These reliefs depict an equestrian figure, a man dressed in himation with a child, and a scene from a funeral supper, or Nekrodeipnon, respectively.

Bronze and glass jewellery originate from the Byzantine graves. In the centre of the hall one can see vessels of the 8th and 7th centuries that served for the burials of the Clazomenians like a man’s burial in a jar, or pithos (4th century BC); a relief clay sarcophagus (5th century BC); two simple clay sarcophagi of children burials (5th-4th centuries BC) and two representations of burials of the 3rd and the 2nd centuries BC on cist graves.