Conference Paper

Twen­ti­eth cen­tury ex­ca­va­tions by Geor­gios Bakalakis and Dim­itrios Lazaridis at Kavala’s old town (Pana­gia promon­tory), brought to light im­pres­sive finds from the sanc­tu­ary of Parthenos, the pa­tron de­ity of an­cient Neapo­lis. Dat­ing mainly to the Ar­chaic pe­riod, these finds tes­tify to the cos­mopoli­tan char­ac­ter of the sanc­tu­ary, its high num­ber of vis­i­tors and the im­por­tant role it played in the North­ern Aegean not only as a sa­cred temenos but also as a so­cial and eco­nomic cen­ter. The ar­chae­o­log­i­cal record in­cluded ar­chi­tec­tural mem­bers, in­scrip­tions, large amounts of pot­tery -both lo­cal and im­ported- and sig­nif­i­cant small finds. It is par­tic­u­larly the lat­ter that need to be ad­dressed, as they in­vite a fresh ex­am­i­na­tion of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pa­tron god­dess of this im­por­tant Thasian colony. 

This pa­per in­ves­ti­gates the apotropaic qual­i­ties of cer­tain ob­jects from the sanc­tu­ary, such as an ex­tra­or­di­nary lead disk, clay and other ar­ti­facts, as­tra­ga­loi, pen­dants, fig­urines and minia­ture ves­sels, at­tempt­ing to un­der­stand their sig­nif­i­cance vis-à-vis the rest of the finds but also key topo­graph­i­cal el­e­ments. This ma­te­r­ial prompts an ex­plo­ration of the role of Parthenos be­yond her po­liadic and kourotrophic pow­ers, fo­cus­ing more on the pro­phy­lac­tic facets of the god­dess. When ex­am­ined in com­par­i­son to sim­i­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics of Thasian Artemis, this new data helps us form a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the rit­ual prac­tices that took place in the sanc­tu­ary of Parthenos.