In March of last year, I blogged about an excavation conducted at the Venizelos metro station which brought to light a very well preserved 70-meter section of a marble-paved road, the remains of buildings dating back to the sixth to ninth centuries AD, as well as big public buildings of the 7th century; a rarity for the Byzantine world. Trouble was (and is) that the site of the find is part of a new subway tunnel and platform which are being built to transport 250,000 passengers daily, and thus decrease traffic congestion and air pollution in the city. The entire subway project has a price-tag of 3.5 billion euros (4.6 billion dollars), and was co-financed by the European Union. To keep the road, the entire subway project would have to be abandoned. To save the subway project, the road would need to be moved, or destroyed--the same thing, according to archaeologists.
By April it looked like Thessaloniki's government and archaeological institutions had found a solution to the problem: they were going to temporarily remove the finds during the station's construction and then restore about 85 percent to 95 percent after the station was completed. The solution proposed had a low cost--0,6 percent to 0.8 percent of the budget--with zero or only a few months delay to the works’ completion. Only a 45 square meter space (out of the area’s 1.600 square meters) would not be restored, due to the placement of vents and escalators.
By February of this year, word got out that the removal of the antiquities from the construction site was suspended in July of last year following a decision reached by the Council of State. The Archaeology News Network is back with an update on the situation, and I would like to share it with you all today, because by now I'm fully invested in the outcome of the project--and it seems I will continue to be so for quite a time to come: experts have estimated that it will take at least another three years and some 40 million euros for the excavation of ancient ruins to be completed. According to the article:
"The Central Archaeological Council (KAS) has recommended that the company constructing the network, Attiko Metro, spend another 42 million euros on the excavations, which have already cost almost 84 million. This would take the total cost of the work, which began in 2006, to more than 130 million euros – the same as it cost to build the Acropolis Museum."
The archaeological yield from the dig site is exceeding all expectations and the number of finds exceed even the finds at Athens when a similar project was undertaken--so far, 135,000 artefacts have been found. No word yet on if the proposal will be accepted, edited, or rejected in its entirety, but needless to say, I will keep you updated.
Image source: Vima
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