Roman Agora of Athens

The four tall columns in front of you formed the main western entrance to the Roman Agora. Around 2,000 years ago, shoppers walked through this gate into a large open marketplace. The columns supported a triangular roof decoration, giving the entrance the grand appearance you can still see today.

Look up at the writing carved across the stone above the columns. It names Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus, the two Roman leaders who helped pay for the new marketplace. The gate was dedicated to Athena, the goddess who protected Athens. Archegetis was one of her titles, meaning something like "leader" or "founder."

Now look toward the inside of the gate. There is another inscription here, added more than a century later. It contains an order from Emperor Hadrian about olive oil. Olive oil was essential in daily life. Athenians cooked with it, used it for lamps, and rubbed it onto their bodies before exercise. Hadrian wanted to make sure enough of it remained available in the city, so his law set rules for selling and exporting it.

There were once statues honoring members of the Roman imperial family near this entrance too. The statues are gone, but their inscriptions have survived. The gate was a place where Roman rulers could show their importance to Athens.

Centuries later, when houses and shops covered much of the old market, the gate was still standing. During Ottoman rule, people called it the Gate of the Bazaar and continued passing through it to reach the busy market district.

Take a moment to look through the columns toward the open square. The ruined area in front of you was once surrounded by covered walkways and shops, with people coming and going through this very entrance.

Along the western side of the market was a long covered walkway called a stoa. Its roof kept shoppers out of the hot sun and rain as they walked past the businesses around the square. Today, only parts of its columns and foundations can be seen. Much of the western side is still buried beneath modern Athens.

The original walkway was about 83 meters long, roughly the length of a soccer field. It was wide enough for several people to walk side by side. The foundations beneath it had to be especially strong because the Romans were building on ground that sloped downhill.

The most surprising discoveries were made outside the area you can walk through today. Archaeologists excavating beneath a modern building found the foundations of this Roman walkway resting directly on walls from an older building. The older walls belonged to a house or shop that had stood here before the Roman Agora existed.

They also found large stone thresholds with small round holes. These holes once held the bottom pivots of wooden doors, allowing them to swing open and shut. The doors have disappeared, but the stone fittings survived. The remains show that people were living or doing business here well before Caesar and Augustus funded the new marketplace.

The builders buried the old walls beneath enormous amounts of earth and broken stone to make a level surface for their new market. Some of the material included fragments of shipping jars from across the Mediterranean. This tells us that Athens was already connected to a busy trading network.

Look along the surviving western side and imagine the missing roof and columns continuing beneath the nearby streets. The buried buildings are not visible from the visitor path, but the exposed remains show where the covered walkway once ran.

You are standing beside the heart of the Roman Agora. What looks like a wide area of scattered stones was once a busy marketplace, surrounded by covered walkways and shops on all four sides.

Imagine arriving here with a basket to buy supplies. You could cross the open courtyard, stop to speak with someone you knew, or turn into the shade to visit a shop. The columns around the edges supported roofs that protected the walkways, while the center remained open to the sky.

The marketplace originally measured about 111 by 104 meters. It was roughly rectangular, but its entrances and surrounding streets did not form a perfectly symmetrical plan. Athens had existed for centuries before this market was built, and the Roman builders had to fit it into an older neighborhood.

Look for the surviving pieces of marble paving. The courtyard was paved with large slabs during the Roman imperial period, after the market's first construction. Some stone was later reused when buildings were repaired or rebuilt. One particularly unusual discovery was a slab carrying part of a legal text connected with Emperor Marcus Aurelius. A document that had once been displayed for people to read eventually became building material.

The northern side is especially hard to picture today. Its walkway and outer wall once continued across land now partly covered by modern buildings. The wall also helped hold up the raised surface of the market. Because so much of it remains underground, the present fence does not show the exact original outline of the building.

Look around the square at the columns, low walls, and later Fethiye Mosque. They belong to different stages of the site's history. The Romans saw an open marketplace here. People living centuries later saw a neighborhood filled with houses, churches, and shops.

The southern edge of the Roman Agora was lined with columns supporting another covered walkway. This was one of the places where people could shop, meet merchants, and shelter from the weather.

Some of the marble here contains names carved by people who used the market. One inscription marks a place associated with a man called Agathokles. Others name Dios, Epiphanes, and Elaphebolios. These were real people who had spaces in or around the walkway. We cannot say exactly what they sold, but their names give us a rare connection to the people who worked here.

Why would someone carve a name into the stone? It may have marked a particular trading spot, rather like claiming a regular place in a market today. Some spaces seem to have been marked more than once, suggesting that their users changed over time.

Look at the low stone foundations and bases that once supported the columns. In places, small grooves and cuttings show where wooden screens or partitions may have been attached. The Romans could divide a section of the open walkway into smaller areas, perhaps creating more enclosed stalls. The wood has rotted away, but the cuts in the marble remain.

There are also circular holes cut into part of the stone floor. Four of these were found close together near the eastern end of the southern walkway. Archaeologists think they may have held official containers used to measure goods. Markets needed agreed measurements so buyers and sellers could check how much they were receiving.

Other finds include weights and a large measure associated with charcoal. These remind us that selling goods involved rules and supervision, as well as people shouting out prices and bargaining with customers.

The carved names and measuring holes can be difficult to spot from the public path. The important thing to notice is the line of the walkway itself. Those surviving stones once formed a busy row of places where ordinary Athenians did business.

Near the southern side of the courtyard are the remains of a fountain-house. It provided water in an area where people spent much of their day shopping and working. The large decorative parts have disappeared, but some of the lower stonework and the area associated with its water supply survive.

Water was important in a busy market. People needed it for drinking, cleaning, and different kinds of work. The fountain's position beside the covered walkway made it useful to the people moving around the courtyard.

Just east of the fountain is a small staircase. It can be easy to overlook because the Roman Agora is famous for its two enormous marble gates. But there was also this third entrance, which led to a street outside the market on higher ground.

Why was the street higher? The Roman Agora was built on the slope below the Acropolis. The builders raised and leveled the marketplace, while the older streets outside followed the natural rise and fall of the land. Instead of making people walk all the way around to a grand entrance, they provided steps connecting the different levels.

Imagine a local resident coming down this staircase from the neighborhood above. In a few moments they could reach the shops, collect what they needed, and head back up the steps toward home.

There were also rooms near the staircase. Their exact use is unknown. Some historians have suggested that market officials might have worked in this part of the complex, but there is not enough evidence to identify a particular office.

Look for the staircase beside the southern wall and the remains of the fountain nearby. The steps show how the market connected with the surrounding city. They are a small but revealing part of the original design.

Along the eastern side of the Roman Agora stood a row of rooms opening onto a covered walkway. The columns and low rectangular foundations you see today are the remains of one of the market's main shopping areas.

Around fifteen rooms have been identified along this side. Some were probably shops, while others may have been used to store goods. The original walls were much taller than the low foundations visible now. Doors, shelves, counters, and wooden shutters have mostly disappeared.

Imagine a shopper walking along the covered passage. On one side was the open courtyard, visible between the columns. On the other were the entrances to the individual rooms. The roof gave customers somewhere cool to walk during the summer and somewhere dry during rain.

Look at the repeated rectangular shapes in the ground. The long walls followed the edge of the marketplace, while shorter walls separated one room from the next. A gap in a wall might once have held a doorway. The exact contents of each shop are unknown, so we cannot say which one sold wine, oil, food, or other products.

This wasn't the only way people traded in the Roman Agora. Some merchants may have occupied smaller marked spaces beneath the colonnades, while others had enclosed rooms like these. The combination of open stalls and permanent shops would have made the marketplace useful for different kinds of business.

The eastern side also contains later walls and repairs. Athens continued to change long after the Roman market was built, and later inhabitants built new rooms among its ruins.

Follow the line of columns toward the Eastern Propylon, the large entrance at the end of this shopping area. The surviving foundations show how closely the shops, shaded walkway, and public courtyard were connected.

The Eastern Propylon was the Roman Agora's second main entrance. It stood on the opposite side of the marketplace from the Gate of Athena Archegetis, but the two entrances looked different.

The western gate had four sturdy columns in a style called Doric. Here, the builders used Ionic columns, recognizable by their decorative curled tops. They also combined different kinds of marble. The gray columns came from Mount Hymettus, near Athens, and stood on lighter marble bases.

People using this gateway moved between the market and the streets to its east. Just beyond were several public buildings, including the Tower of the Winds, the Roman toilets, and the three-arched monument you will visit next.

Look at the surviving steps and the changes in ground level. The marketplace stood on a raised platform, while the streets outside were at different heights. The entrance helped people move between them.

There is another curious detail: this gate did not sit directly opposite the western entrance along a perfect straight line. Roman architects could design impressive, orderly buildings, but they still had to deal with the older streets and houses around them. Athens was not an empty piece of land waiting to be laid out.

Look back along the eastern columns. The shops opened onto a covered walkway just inside the gateway. A customer could enter here, turn toward the shops, or cross the market to the other side.

The original upper sections of the gate are largely missing. What survives is enough to show where the entrance stood and how people approached it, even though the busy streets that once continued beyond it have changed dramatically.

Near the Tower of the Winds is a curious structure with broad stone steps and the remains of three arched openings. It is usually called the Agoranomion, a name connected with the officials who checked trade and prices in ancient marketplaces.

For many years, people thought this was where the market inspectors worked. An inscription mentioning their office had been discovered nearby, and historians connected it with the ruins.

But there was a problem. Finding an inscription near a building does not mean it originally belonged to that building. Stone blocks were often moved and reused as Athens changed over the centuries.

A different explanation is now considered more likely. The three arches may have formed a grand gateway leading from the area near the Roman Agora into another street or public space farther east. In that case, the openings were passages for people walking through, rather than entrances to three separate office rooms.

Look at the wide staircase. It led people up toward the arches from the lower level near the marketplace. That change in height makes sense for a gateway connecting two parts of the city.

The building was decorated with marble, and part of an inscription dedicated it to Athena and the Roman emperors who had been honored as gods. It was clearly meant to impress people passing by.

Not everything you see is ancient. Parts of the brickwork were added during repairs in the 19th century to stop the surviving arches from collapsing. The later repairs are another chapter in the monument's long history.

The true location of the market inspectors' office is still unknown. Look at the steps and the three openings, then imagine this structure as the entrance to a street once lined with buildings that have disappeared.

The Tower of the Winds is one of the most unusual buildings in Athens. It looks like a small marble tower with eight sides, but around 2,000 years ago it was a remarkable piece of technology. It showed the time and helped people see which way the wind was blowing.

The tower was designed by a man called Andronikos, who came from Kyrrhos in Macedonia. It was built before the Roman marketplace beside it. Its eight sides face eight different directions, like a compass.

Look up near the top of the tower. Each wall has a carved figure with wings. These are the eight winds, shown as people. The north wind, Boreas, is wrapped up against the cold. Other figures hold objects that suggest the weather they bring. Their names were carved near the roof. Walk around the tower and you can see the different winds facing the directions they came from.

There used to be a bronze figure on the roof, probably shaped like the sea god Triton. It turned when the wind blew and pointed toward the correct wind sculpture. The bronze figure is gone, but the marble winds are still here.

Now look lower down the outside walls. Some contain thin lines carved into the marble. These were sundials. A small metal pointer cast a shadow across the lines, showing the time as the sun moved. The pointers have disappeared, but parts of the markings remain.

Of course, a sundial doesn't work at night or when the sky is cloudy. So the tower had a second clock inside that measured time using flowing water. The original machinery is gone, and nobody knows exactly how every part worked. The round structure attached to the southern side of the tower was probably part of its water supply.

The tower's story did not end with ancient science. During the Middle Ages it became a Christian religious building. Later, under Ottoman rule, Muslim dervishes used it as a place of worship. Traces of painted decorations from different periods still survive inside.

Look for the eight wind sculptures, the faint sundial lines, and the small round addition on the southern side. The tower has stood through Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Athens, which helps explain why so much of it is still standing.

Just northwest of the Tower of the Winds are the remains of a Roman public toilet. The Romans called this kind of building a latrine. The surviving stonework shows that this was once a proper public facility serving people in the busy marketplace district.

Look for the stone seating along the sides. The seats had openings cut into them, and people sat next to one another with little or no privacy. Beneath the seats was a channel that carried waste away with flowing water.

There was also a smaller entrance room on the eastern side. Visitors passed through it before reaching the main toilet chamber. It helped separate the toilet area from the street outside.

It might seem strange today to share a bathroom with strangers, but communal public toilets were familiar features of Roman city life. A busy market brought traders, shoppers, travelers, and workers together all day, so a large public toilet was a practical necessity.

Running the building required water. Roman engineers used channels and drains to move waste away rather than simply allowing it to collect beneath the benches. The surviving seats and drainage remains show how much planning went into this everyday service.

The ruins are traditionally called the Vespasianae. That name is associated with Roman public toilets, but it does not mean Emperor Vespasian personally built these particular ones.

Look at the openings in the benches and the drain running below them. These remains give you a much more personal glimpse of Roman life than the grand gateways and marble columns nearby.

The large domed building inside the Roman Agora is the Fethiye Mosque. It looks very different from the columns and foundations around it because it was built more than 1,600 years after the Roman marketplace.

Its name means the Mosque of the Conquest. The mosque belongs to the time when Athens was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The building you see today mostly dates to the 17th century, though the site had been used for worship long before that.

Before the mosque stood here, there was a Christian church. Archaeologists have found remains from that earlier building beneath and around the mosque. This is one of the clearest examples of how people reused the Roman Agora over the centuries. The same area that once contained shops and walkways became a neighborhood of churches, houses, and later an Ottoman market.

Look at the mosque's roof. The large central dome is surrounded by smaller domed sections, giving the building its distinctive shape. This architecture is completely different from the open colonnades of the Roman marketplace.

The surrounding area was also used for burials during the medieval period. Excavators found graves near the earlier church, including one that contained bones from several individuals. Those graves are not generally visible today, but they show that this was once part of a living neighborhood where people worshipped and buried their dead.

During Ottoman times, the Roman Agora was part of a busy bazaar. The western marble gate even became known as the Gate of the Bazaar. The old marketplace had changed almost beyond recognition, but people were still buying and selling goods in the same district.

After Athens became the capital of modern Greece in 1834, the mosque stopped being used for Muslim worship. It later served as a military bakery and then as storage for ancient objects. Restoration work has since helped preserve it.

Stand back and look at the mosque with the Roman ruins around it. You can see two very different periods of Athens in the same view. That is what makes the Roman Agora more than a collection of Roman buildings.