For ten years of rescue excavations by Ephorat of the antiquities of Piraeus and the islands in SNFCChowever, most were interested to know the details mainly about the mass grave of shackled knitters in Faleric Delta.

A small but periodic exhibition at the Piraeus Archaeological Museum entitled “Faliroten. Between two worlds”, forces us to focus on the overall picture of these finds, and not exclusively on the finds of “violent deaths”. “This is also the reason why we made this exhibition with 140 objects out of the thousands that have been discovered,” – says Stella Chrysulaki “K”.director of Ephoria, “and what is shown is archaic Athens from the side of life, not death.”

In four sections, the visitor observes the customs of the Attic burials in the early and late archaic period, social classes, the number of people who barely made ends meet, and a small number of the very rich. This cemetery depicts the absence of a middle class,” Ms. Chrysulaki explains. This is characteristic of the social organization of the city. “In other words, it has all the elements of differentiation and grouping that one would expect from a depiction of the social structure of that time, early Athens.”

Child mortality (1/3 of the cemetery) and how the family – poor and rich – tenderly treated the death of their children is another block. Small vases, symbols, pieces of cloth, toys, these are some of the things they put on the baby to travel to the other world. This is followed by proto-Attic ceramic archaic angiography and the wealth of Attic workshops, while the fourth traces what bioarchaeological research has to offer. The identity of the people who were buried, as well as elements of collective history, the evolution of society.

This exhibition is worth seeing. Because she wants to give an image not of the silent land of the cemetery, but of the many living stories of people who lived in a period when little was known about the city, says the head of Ephorat, emphasizing that during this period she worked at a furious pace in the laboratory of the state development of Athens .