Abdera, Thrace

Location of Abdera and its two successive metropolises, Clazomenae and Teos.

The chief coin type, with griffon.

The Phoenicians apparently began the settlement of Abdera at some point before the mid-7th century[4] and the town long maintained Phoenician standards in its coinage.

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.)[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]

Strabo describes Abdera as "a Thracian city"[13] 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 yoke.[14][15] 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.[16]

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.[17] 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 acknowledged the hospitality of its inhabitants by presenting them with a tiara and scimitar of gold.[18] Thucydides[19] mentions Abdera as the westernmost limit of the Odrysian kingdom when at its height at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. It later became part of the Delian League and fought on the side of Athens in the Peloponnesian war.[20]

Abdera was a wealthy city, the third richest in the League, due to its status as a prime port for trade with the interior of Thrace and the Odrysian kingdom.[10] In 408 BC, Abdera was reduced under the power of Athens by Thrasybulus, then one of the Athenian generals in that quarter.[21]

A valuable prize, the city was repeatedly sacked: by the Triballi in 376 BC, Philip II of Macedon in 350 BC; later by Lysimachos of Thrace,[15] the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, and again by the Macedonians. In 170 BC the Roman armies and those of Eumenes II of Pergamon besieged and sacked it.

The town seems to have declined in importance after the middle of the 4th century BC.[16] Cicero ridicules the city as a byword for stupidity in his letters to Atticus, writing of a debate in the Senate, "Here was Abdera, but I wasn't silent" ("Hic, Abdera non tacente me").[22] The Philogelos, a Greek-language joke book compiled in the 4th century AD, has a chapter dedicated to jokes about dumb Abderans.[23] Nevertheless, the city counted among its citizens the philosophers Democritus, Protagoras[15] and Anaxarchus, historian and philosopher Hecataeus of Abdera, and the lyric poet Anacreon. Pliny the Elder speaks of Abdera as being in his time a free city.[24]

The west gate of classical Abdera

Abdera had flourished especially in ancient times mainly for two reasons: because of the large area of their territory and their highly strategic position. The city controlled two great road passages (one of Nestos river and other through the mountains north of Xanthi). Furthermore, from their ports passed the sea road, which from Troas led to the Thracian and then the Macedonian coast.[25]

The ruins of the town may still be seen on Cape Balastra (40°56'1.02"N 24°58'21.81"E); they cover seven small hills, and extend from an eastern to a western harbor; on the southwestern hills are the remains of the medieval settlement of Polystylon (Greek: Πολύστυλον). Since the 9th century, Byzantine Polystylon was an episcopal see, under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan bishop of Philippi. By the end of the 14th century it fell under the Ottoman rule.[2]

Avdira as a modern administrative unit (community) was established in 1924, and consisted of the villages Avdira, Myrodato (Kalfalar), Pezoula, Giona, Veloni and Mandra, but Myrodato and Mandra became separate communities in 1928.[26] The municipality Avdira was formed in 1997 by the merger of the former communities Avdira, Mandra, Myrodato and Nea Kessani.[3] At the 2011 local government reform it merged with the former municipalities Selero and Vistonida, and the town Genisea became its seat.[3][27]

The municipality has an area of 352.047 km², the municipal unit 161.958 km².[28] The municipal unit Avdira is subdivided into the communities Avdira, Mandra, Myrodato and Nea Kessani. The community Avdira consists of the settlements Avdira, Giona, Lefkippos, Pezoula and Skala.

• Grant, Michael (1986). A Guide to the Ancient World. Michael Grant Publications.
• Agelarakis, Anagnostis; Agelarakis, Argiro (2015). "Αbdera/ Polystylon: A Byzantine Town in Western Thrace in the Context of Historical Developments during the 6th-14th Centuries as Depicted by its Archaeo-Anthropological Record". Byzantina Symmeikta. 25: 11–56. doi:10.12681/byzsym.1159.