It was the largest building of classical Greece: the palace where Alexander the Great was proclaimed king before he launched a conquest that took him as far as modern-day Afghanistan.
The Palace of Aigai in northern Greece was fully reopened on Friday following a 16-year renovation that cost more than 20 million euros (US$21.89 million) and included financial support from the EU.
It was built more than 2,300 years ago during the reign of Alexander’s father, Phillip II of Macedon, who had transformed the kingdom of Macedonia into a dominant military power of ancient Greece. Aigai was its royal capital.
Photo: AFP
“After many years of painstaking work, we can reveal the palace... What we are doing today is an event of global importance,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at an on-site inauguration event on Friday.
The palace contained colonnaded courtyards, courts, places of worship and spacious banquet halls, with floors decorated with patterned marble and intricate mosaics. The building covered a ground area of 15,000m2 — a little under the area covered by the US Capitol building.
Shaped like two adjoining, unequally sized square doughnuts, the Palace of Aigai was the administrative and spiritual center of the kingdom. The palace remnants and nearby royal tombs are a UN World Heritage Site at the area next to the modern village of Vergina. Like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, the marble columns were resurrected by fitting pieces of stone unearthed in the ruins together with replica replacement parts.
About 65km southwest of the port city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, Aigai drew international attention in the late 1970s during burial mound excavations in the area of rolling green hills with patches of wild poppies and daffodils.
The late Greek archeologist Manolis Andronikos led the digs and discovered the royal tombs, recovering a gold casket and other gold artifacts, as well as bones widely believed to belong to Philip II. The discoveries revealed the sophistication of the ancient Macedonians, who had often been sidelined in historical accounts by attention on Athens.
Angeliki Kottaridi was still a university archeology student when she joined the project as a young assistant. She devoted her life’s work to the excavations and decades later became the driving force behind the new museum at Aigai, which opened a year ago, along with the palace restoration.
She retired on Sunday last week as head of the region’s archeological service and was honored at Friday’s ceremony.
“What you discover is stones scattered in the dirt, and pieces of mosaics here and there,” Kottaridi told state television ahead of Friday’s inauguration.
“Then you have to assemble things and that’s the real joy of the researcher,” Kottaridi said. “So when people ask me what makes me happy, I tell them it’s not the moment something is revealed. It’s the moment you realize you can take the knowledge one step further.”
The renovated site is to open to the public today.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
SANCTIONS: Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner called on the EU to tighten sanctions against Rwanda during an event in Brussels The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has accused the EU of “an obvious double standard” for maintaining a minerals deal with Rwanda to supply Europe’s high-tech industries when it deployed a far-wider sanctions regime in response to the war in Ukraine. Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner urged the EU to levy much stronger sanctions against Rwanda, which has fueled the conflict in the eastern DR Congo, describing the bloc’s response to breaches of the DR Congo’s territory as “very timid.” Referencing the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she said: “It is an obvious double standard
RSS