Mitsotakis Inaugurates Upgraded Kerameikos Archaeological Site in Athens

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Tuesday inaugurated upgraded visitor infrastructure at the Kerameikos archaeological site, one of ancient Athens’ most important cemeteries and pottery quarters, saying the works make it easier to walk a path that once belonged to the city’s earliest citizens.

The ceremony was held on site in the early evening, with the Acropolis visible beyond the ruins. Culture Minister Lina Mendoni welcomed the prime minister. The renewed site and museum were handed back to the public the same day.

“Every time we find ourselves in this special part of Athens, we feel a sense of awe,” Mitsotakis said. “Awe for this place that connects yesterday with today, on this path once walked by the ancient Athenians.”

He said the route is now easier because of the completed interventions, “preserving this very particular relief of the landscape, while at the same time highlighting the unique sculptures of the city that gave birth to democracy.”

The accessibility and presentation project ran from 2023 to 2026 and was funded with about €4 million from the Recovery and Resilience Facility. It was carried out by the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens and the Directorate for the Restoration of Ancient Monuments.

Kerameikos was in use from prehistoric times through late antiquity. It was both the principal cemetery of the ancient city and one of the great centres of pottery and vase-painting in the Greek world. Funeral orations for fallen citizens, including Pericles’ Funeral Oration, were delivered here. Processions toward the Acropolis and Eleusis also began from this ground.

What has changed

Officials said the works were not a collection of small fixes but a full rethink of how visitors enter the site, move through it and understand the monuments.

Among the completed changes:

• A new visitor reception building on Ermou Street, replacing a makeshift ticket booth and shop
• A new exit and multi-use building on Agion Asomaton Street, with a café, shop, rest areas and facilities for families, older visitors and people with disabilities
• About 4.5 extra stremmata added to the archaeological area, including previously isolated ground
• Newly visible remains of defensive walls, houses and workshops from the Hellenistic and Roman periods
• More than 3,500 trees and plants
• Displays of funerary monuments, pottery linked to the district’s ceramic tradition, and the artwork Transfer by Maria Loizidou, donated by NEON to the Ministry of Culture

Mendoni said Kerameikos is one of the few places in modern Athens where the ancient topography can still be read over a large area, and where a visitor can still sense the passage from the walled city to the land beyond the walls.

Athens as an open-air museum

Mitsotakis placed the project inside a wider Attica programme: more than 100 cultural interventions and about €350 million, including recent works at the Ancient Agora. He said investment in heritage is also an investment in Athens as a destination in its own right, not only a stop on the way to the islands.

“Through this walk in such an important place, we meet again a political system that has endured through time,” he said, “one that has been able to renew itself constantly so that, 2,500 years later, it is certainly not perfect, but still the best system for organising society.”

He added that travellers continue to come to Athens “in ever greater numbers, essentially to walk through a great open-air museum.”

The prime minister said Recovery Fund projects, including Kerameikos, were finished on schedule “without a single euro being lost,” and that more culture works would be delivered in the coming months.

Official photographs from the prime minister’s office show Mitsotakis speaking beside a large aerial image of the site, touring the museum with Mendoni, and walking among architectural fragments near the church of Agia Triada.

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