Ancient Abdera

Abdera (Greek: ) is a municipality in the Xanthi regional unit of Thrace, Greece. In classical antiquity, it was a major Greek polis on the Thracian coast. The ancient polis is to be distinguished from the municipality, which was named in its honor. The polis lay 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos River, almost directly opposite the island of Thasos. It was a colony placed in previously unsettled Thracian territory, not then a part of Hellas, during the age of Greek colonization. The city that developed from it became of major importance in ancient Greece. After the 4th century AD it declined, contracted to its acropolis, and was abandoned, never to be reoccupied except by archaeologists. During the Early Middle Ages, a new settlement emerged near the ancient city. It was called Polystylon (Greek: ), and later considered as the New Abdera (Greek: ). In 2011 the modern municipality of Abdera was synoecized from three previous municipalities comprising a number of modern settlements. The ancient site remains in it as a ruin. The municipality of Abdera has 17,610 inhabitants (2021). The seat of the municipality is the town Genisea.

The name Abdera is of Phoenician origin and was shared in antiquity by Abdera, Spain and a town near Carthage in North Africa. It was variously Hellenized as (Ábdēra), (Aúdēra), (Ábdara), (Ábdēron), and (Ábdēros), before being Latinized as Abdera. Greek legend attributed the name to an eponymous Abderus who fell nearby and was memorialized by Hercules's founding of a city at the location. The present-day town is written Avdira and pronounced [avðira] in modern Greek.

The Phoenicians apparently began the settlement of Abdera at some point before the mid-7th century and the town long maintained Phoenician standards in its coinage. Sapaeans (Ancient Greek, "") were a Thracian tribe close to the Greek city of Abdera. The Greek settlement was begun as a failed colony from Klazomenai, traditionally dated to 654 BC. (Evidence in 7th-century-BC Greek pottery tends to support the traditional date but the exact timing remains uncertain.) Herodotus reports that the leader of the colony had been Timesios but, within his generation, the Thracians had expelled the colonists. Timesios was subsequently honored as a local protective spirit by the later Abderans from Teos. Others recount various legends about this colony. Plutarch and Aelian relate that Timesios grew insufferable to his colonists because of his desire to do everything by himself; when one of their children let him know how they all really felt, he quit the settlement in disgust; modern scholars have tried to split the difference between the two accounts of early Abdera's failure by giving the latter as the reason for Timesios's having left Klazomenai. Strabo describes Abdera as "a Thracian city" at the time of Anacreon and the migration of people from Teos to that area. The successful colonisation occurred in 544 BC, when the majority of the people of Teos (including the poet Anacreon) migrated to Abdera to escape the Persian invasion of their homeland. The chief coin type, a griffon, is identical with that of Teos; the rich silver coinage is noted for the beauty and variety of its reverse types. In 513 and 512 BC, the Persians, under Darius conquered Abdera, by which time the city seems to have become a place of considerable importance, and is mentioned as one of the cities which had the expensive honour of entertaining the great king on his march into Greece. In 492 BC, after the Ionian Revolt, the Persians again conquered Abdera, again under Darius I but led by his general Mardonius. On his flight after the Battle of Salamis, Xerxes stopped at Abdera and acknow

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).