The state laboratory of Athens in Faliro
In the “Falirothen” exhibition, 140 findings from the archaic era are presented.
In the ten years of the rescue excavation of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands in SNFCCit is true that most people were interested in knowing details mainly about the mass burial of the chained binders Faleric Delta.
A small periodic exhibition at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus entitled “Falirothen. Between two worlds”, to focus on the overall picture of those findings and not exclusively on the findings of “violent deaths”. “This is also the reason why he is doing this exhibition with 140 objects out of the thousands that were revealed”, says Stella Chrysoulaki to “K”.director of the Ephoria, “and what is projected is archaic Athens from the side of life and not of death”.
In the four sections, the visitor observes the Attic burial customs during the early and late archaic period, the social classes, the number of people who barely got by, but also the small number of the very rich. The lack of the middle class is depicted in this cemetery, explains Mrs. Chrysoulaki. It is characteristic of the social organization of the city. “In other words, it has all the elements of differentiation and grouping that one can expect to have an image of the social structure of the time, of early Athens.”
Child mortality (1/3 of the cemetery), and how the family – poor and rich – tenderly attended to the death of their children is a following unit. Small vases, symbols, pieces of cloth, toys, are definitive of what was placed on the baby, for the journey to the other world. This is followed by the proto-Attic ceramic archaic angiography and the richness of the Attic workshops, while the fourth, monitors what the bioarchaeological study has to offer. The identity of the people who have been buried, but also elements from the collective history, the evolution of a society.
This exhibition is worth seeing. Because he does not want to give the image of a silent land of the cemetery, but the multitude of living stories of the people who lived in a period when little was known about the city, says the head of the Ephorate, emphasizing that during this period he was working with fast speeds the laboratory of the state development of Athens.