Few public works projects have engendered as much anxiety among archeologists as the ambitious effort to ease traffic congestion by building a subway in this city where civilizations have been layered upon one another for 3,000 years.
Fears about the impact of the excavation on the revered monuments above ground and unknown artifacts below stalled the project for 35 years. In those years, traffic and accompanying air pollution grew steadily worse, damaging many of the monuments the archeologists were determined to protect.
When construction began in 1992, the work was carried out under the scrutiny of 50 archeologists from the Greek government. Creating the largest archeological site in Athens history, the experts followed behind the excavating equipment, sifting debris and stopping the machinery every few feet to inspect the subterranean layers for artifacts.
Judging from the works that are being displayed permanently in the subway stations and the pieces on exhibit through December at Athens’ Museum of Cycladic Art, the shotgun marriage between archeologists and builders has produced a new vision of how ancient Athenians lived and died.
The museum exhibition, “The City Beneath the City,” contains 500 items of clay, bronze, marble, glass and ivory culled from 10,000 objects recovered during the digging. Arrayed in a sequence that follows the excavation of the subway stations, the artifacts trace the development of human life in Athens from the 17th Century B.C. to the 8th Century A.D., from the Mycenaean period to the Byzantine era.
“The finds are not star artifacts, but they are very significant in their archeological context,” said Dimitris Plantzos, curator of the museum. “They provide a fresh view of the Athenian topography through a long sequence of archeological periods.”
From one large site surrounding a subway station, archeologists unearthed tombs from 1100 B.C. and statues from the 4th Century B.C. Just a few feet beneath the main thoroughfare in the center of Athens, they discovered Roman baths from the 3rd and 4th Centuries A.D.
But the most illuminating objects are the evidence of everyday life in ancient Athens that illustrate how people lived, traded, debated, fought, worshiped and buried their dead. These are often coarse items–lamps, toys, needles, tools, vases and coffins–but others are exquisite.
While most of the artifacts were discovered while excavating the stations and surrounding areas–sites that were close to the surface and therefore close to where people lived even in ancient times–two huge tunnel-boring machines ground away at the subsoil at depths of 40 to 65 feet, using a specially designed cutter head 31 feet in diameter. The machines operated continuously and progress was slow, averaging about 35 feet a day as the cutters rotated at less than four revolutions per minute.
Operators monitored progress through video cameras on the front of the machines and archeologists monitored what came off conveyors at the rear. When someone discovered something of potential significance, the machine was stopped so the experts, toothbrushes and tiny picks in hand, could uncover the treasures.
“They moved slower than Charlie Chaplin,” Fady P. Bassily, general manager of the metro system, said.
The delays added two years and at least $70 million to the $1.8 billion cost of the project so far, said officials at Attiko Metro, the company established by the government to build and operate the subway.
Twice, the routes of subway lines were diverted to avoid plowing through a cemetery and an ancient bath. One station was canceled after discovery of a mass grave of plague victims with nearly 1,000 tombs from the 5th and 4th Centuries B.C.
“Nobody overrides an archeologist in Greece,” Bassily said as he described the painstaking process. “There is no peace with these people. They are fundamentalists.”
Not all finds were the product of tweezers and magnifying glasses. While digging a trial tunnel near the Acropolis, excavators sliced through an ancient well and a cascade of hundreds of clay jars and shards spilled forth. The jars had been dropped into the well as part of funeral ceremonies. Fittingly, given the way they were discovered, the jars were payment to the mythical ferryman who carried the souls of the newly departed along an underground river to the afterlife.
Not all of the finds are in the museum. Many treasures were incorporated into the design of the metro stations, where they intrigue and entertain passengers and visitors. Glass-fronted cases hold jars, bowls, plates and statues; models known as stratigraphs illustrate the strata at which life existed in Athens over the centuries.
The stations are clean and sparkling, clad with marble panels and graffiti-free. The best of them–Syntagma and Acropolis–rival the beauty of the finest stops on the Paris and Moscow subways.
Syntagma (or Constitution Square) station in the heart of the city contains one of the most eye-catching exhibits, a grave still in the earth’s strata containing a nearly intact skeleton from the 4th Century B.C. The tomb is encased behind glass as part of a stratigraph, with the skeleton exposed.
The star of the stations is the newly opened Acropolis stop, 1,000 feet from the entrance to the famed limestone hill and the Parthenon, the 5th Century B.C. temple of the goddess Athena regarded as the finest example of classical Greek art.
Among the station’s wares are original items from the excavation and full-size replicas of the statues and frieze from the Parthenon known as the Elgin Marbles. The reproduction of the frieze runs along the subway platform, integrated beautifully into the design in the way the original was on Athena’s temple.
The Athens metro has a practical side, too, and those who run the system say it has been as successful as the excavation. The subway was inaugurated last January and since five new stations on one of the two new lines opened in November, ridership has risen to nearly 400,000 people a day.
Bassily, who managed the Metro in Washington before coming to Athens four years ago, said traffic congestion has dropped by 15 percent in the city center, and the air seems cleaner in what was once Europe’s most polluted city.
Work is under way on new extentions, which are outside the city center and expected to be less rich in treasures.
The construction delays make it unlikely that the line linking downtown Athens to the planned Olympic Stadium on the outskirts will be completed in time for the games in four years, said Bassily.
