Threads
Ancient Lerna
The Hydra, the prehistoric settlement and the excavations.
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6000 BC – 3200 BC
First farmers settle by the springs of Lerna
In the Neolithic, more than 6,000 years ago, farmers settled on a low rise beside the springs, just south of today's village. Each generation built on the ruins of the last, so the settlement mound of Lerna slowly grew.…
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2500 BC – 2200 BC
The House of the Tiles
At the centre of Early Bronze Age Lerna stood a large two-storey building roofed with baked clay tiles and stone slabs. Rows of seal impressions found inside show that goods were stored and checked here, so it probably…
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c. 1250 BC
Lerna is abandoned
Lerna stayed inhabited into the Middle Bronze Age. In the Mycenaean period the hill was used mainly as a cemetery and lived on only now and then, and around 1250 BC it was abandoned for good.
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c. 700 BC
Hesiod tells of the Hydra of Lerna
Around 700 BC the poet Hesiod is the first to write about the Hydra, the many-headed water serpent of the marshes of Lerna, killed by Heracles. In the later version of the story two heads grew back for every one he…
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c. 67
Emperor Nero tries to find the bottom of the lake
Beside the springs lay the Alcyonian lake, said to have no bottom; through it, the Argives believed, Dionysus went down to the underworld to fetch his mother Semele. Pausanias tells that the emperor Nero had ropes many…
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130–199
A statue of Antinoos in a sanctuary near Lerna
After Antinoos, the young favourite of Emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile in 130 AD and was declared a god, statues of him were set up across the empire. One of them, slightly larger than life and crowned with ivy like…
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c. 160
Pausanias visits Lerna and Mount Pontinos
The Greek travel writer Pausanias describes the sacred grove of plane trees that began at Mount Pontinos, the mysteries held there for Lernaean Demeter, the spring of Amymone and the bottomless Alcyonian lake. On the…
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1175–1399
A castle rises on Pontinos
On the summit where Pausanias had seen the ruined sanctuary of Athena, a fortress was built with an outer ward, a six-sided redoubt, a square keep and cisterns. When exactly is disputed: Wallace McLeod thought it…
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1347
A priest for the castle: the will of Gautier de Brienne
In his will of 1347, Gautier VI de Brienne, Lord of Argos and Nauplia and titular Duke of Athens, names his castle of Chamires. He left sixty hyperpyra a year, from the rent of a cloth shop in Argos, for a priest who had…
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1479
The castle on Pontinos falls out of use
After the Venetian–Ottoman war of 1463–1479 the castle was allowed to stay in Venetian hands on condition that it was not rebuilt. From then on it gradually disappears from the record; roofs collapsed and the walls began…
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1861
Two German archaeologists draw a plan of Lerna
Alexander Conze and Adolf Michaelis published a plate of sketch plans from their travels in the Argolid, including a plan of the Lerna area with Mount Pontinos and the gulf.
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7 August 1939 – 12 August 1939
Americans excavate the blockhouse near Myloi
From 7 to 12 August 1939 Louis E. Lord, Alison Frantz and Carl Roebuck of the American School excavated an ancient blockhouse three kilometres beyond the spring of Lerna, beside the road to Tripoli. The finds were given…
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13 July 1941
A German survey aircraft photographs Myloi from the air
On the morning of 13 July 1941 an aerial survey unit of the German air ministry flew over Myloi at about a thousand metres with camera no. 741 pointing straight down. The photographs, a strip from north to south along…
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1952
John Caskey starts digging at Lerna
In 1952 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, led by its director John L. Caskey, opened the first trenches in the low mound by the springs, at the edge of Myloi. The work went on every year until 1958.
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1952–1953
Caskey photographs the marshes of Lerna
Caskey's first report shows the site from Mount Pontinos: marshes, the stream Amymone running from the spring to the gulf, orchards and the railway. It is one of the best pictures of the water landscape just before the…
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1953
A trench right beside the railway
In 1953 the diggers opened Area D right next to the Argos–Myloi railway, so trains passed only a few metres from the trench. The plates in Hesperia show both the ancient walls and the tracks.
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1954
The House of the Tiles comes to light
By the summer of 1954 a large part of the House of the Tiles was exposed: a big Early Bronze Age building (around 2500–2200 BC) whose roof had been covered with baked clay tiles. Caskey published the first photographs in…
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1954
Forty people on the dig, the staff living in Myloi
In 1954 the team photographed itself: some forty people, archaeologists and workmen, many of them probably from the village. That season the staff lodged in Myloi, among them the field architect Lloyd Cotsen and the…
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1955
Graves just beyond the last houses of Myloi
The excavators also found a Geometric cemetery "a short distance beyond the southernmost houses of the village of Myloi", at the foot of Pontinos. Caskey's lists of the graves and their locations are kept in the Lerna…
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1956
Young George Bass digs at Lerna
In 1956 the American student George F. Bass worked at Lerna, where he was photographed holding a large pot in a trench. He later became one of the founders of underwater archaeology.
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August 1956
A stone grave found at the entrance of the village
In August 1956 the Greek Archaeological Service, under E. Protonotariou, cleaned a stone cist grave found on a private plot at the entrance of Myloi from Argos. It was published in the Archaiologiki Ephimeris.
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1957
Land around the site is expropriated
The records of the American School contain a 1957 file of documents about land expropriations at Lerna, which bordered the fields and orchards of Myloi. The file has not yet been studied, so the owners and the…
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1957–1959
The castle on Pontinos is measured and drawn
Wallace E. McLeod, a Norton Fellow of the American School who worked at Lerna in 1957–59, photographed and planned the castle on Pontinos and the Tower of the Princess. He published them in Hesperia in 1962 under the…
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12 January 1957
Lerna in the Illustrated London News
On 12 January 1957 the Illustrated London News printed an article by Caskey about Lerna, with an aerial photograph of the mound and a view of the House of the Tiles. Readers across the world could now see the place by…
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June 1957 – September 1957
A roof over the House of the Tiles
Between June and September 1957 a large protective shelter was built over the House of the Tiles, so the mud-brick walls could stay visible. The roof still stands at the site today.
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July 1957
Alison Frantz photographs the excavation
In July 1957 the photographer Alison Frantz made the official pictures of Lerna for Hesperia. One shows the site from the north-west with the railway and the sea, another from the east with Myloi and Pontinos behind.
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1958
Machteld Mellink photographs Lerna in colour
In 1958, the last digging season, the archaeologist Machteld J. Mellink took colour slides of the Early Bronze Age walls and the fortification of Lerna III, already under small tiled roofs. The slides are kept at Bryn…
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30 June 1959
The village council makes John Caskey an honorary citizen
By unanimous decision no. 45 the council of Myloi declared the American archaeologist John Caskey an honorary citizen, for services to culture and to tourism in the community. It was signed by president Chr. Papagiannis…
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2 July 1959
Lerna is handed over to the Greek state
On 2 July 1959 Caskey handed over the excavated site and the finds, now displayed in the museum of Argos, to the Greek Archaeological Service. He gave the key of the shelter to Ioannis Papadimitriou, in the presence of…
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31 July 1959
New York's Greek paper reports the honour
On 31 July 1959 the Greek-American daily Εθνικός Κήρυξ in New York reported, in its provincial news, that Caskey had been made an honorary citizen of Myloi. The news from the village thus reached emigrants in America.
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1968
An aerial photo of Lerna and Myloi
Very probably in June 1968 the Jesuit photographer Raymond V. Schoder flew over the gulf and photographed Lerna and Myloi from the east: the shelter over the House of the Tiles, the village, the railway and the orchards.
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1977
A guidebook for visitors to Lerna
In 1977 the American School published the short guide Lerna in the Argolid for visitors to the site by Myloi. A revised edition followed in 1997; the photographs used for both are kept in the Lerna archive.