Pella

Pella was probably founded at the beginning of the 4th century BC by Archelaus I as the new capital of Macedon, supplanting Aigai, which remained the burial place of the kings, though it may have been the work of Amyntas III. A strategic port in Lower Macedonia, joined to the Thermaic Gulf by a navigable inlet, it was left inland when harbour and gulf silted up. Herodotus names the place in his account of Xerxes' campaign, Thucydides in his of the war against Sitalces, king of the Thracians.

Archelaus invited the painter Zeuxis to decorate his palace, and later hosted the poet Timotheus of Miletus and the Athenian playwright Euripides, who finished his days at Pella writing and producing Archelaus. Euripides' Bacchae was first staged here about 408 BC. Xenophon records that at the beginning of the 4th century BC Pella was the largest Macedonian city. Philip II was born there in 382 BC.

Alexander the Great was born at Pella in 356 BC. The city was already walled in his father's time, and Philip II made it a place of great international importance. It lay south of and below the palace on a grid of eight rows of rectangular blocks, each about 45 metres wide. The agora at its centre, built in the last quarter of the 4th century BC, covered about seven hectares, ten city blocks. Pella was one of the first known cities to have piped water carried to individual houses.

The palace stood on a hill 70 metres high to the north and occupied some 75,000 square metres, its oldest parts dating from Philip II's reign between 350 and 330 BC, behind a southern portico at least 153 metres long broken by a triple propylaeum 15 metres high. Its scale indicates a seat of government housing much of the kingdom's administration, not a royal residence alone. Cassander redesigned and expanded the city; the reign of Antigonus has left the most archaeological remains, and the poet Aratus died at Pella about 240 BC.

Polybius and Livy name Pella as the capital of Philip V and of Perseus in the wars against Rome. In 168 BC the Romans sacked the city and carried its treasury to Rome. Livy recorded what Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus, the victor of Pydna, saw in 167 BC: a city on the south-west slope of a hill, ringed by a marsh too deep to cross on foot, with the citadel known as the Phacus standing in the marsh itself, "projecting like an island", joined to the city by a single bridge that could be very easily guarded.

Pella was declared capital of the third administrative division of the Roman province of Macedonia, with the Via Egnatia running through it between Dyrrachium and Thessalonica, and activity remained vigorous until the early 1st century BC. An earthquake destroyed the city in about 90 BC — shops and workshops of that date have been dug out with remains of their merchandise — and it was rebuilt over its own ruins. Cicero stayed there in 58 BC, by which time the provincial seat had moved to Thessalonica. Between 45 and 30 BC Pella was promoted to a Roman colony, and Augustus settled there peasants whose land he had usurped to give to his veterans. About AD 180 Lucian of Samosata could describe it in passing as "now insignificant, with very few inhabitants".

A fortified village occupied the Roman site in the Byzantine period, and the southern part of the city, next to the lagoon, was still lived in during the 4th century. Nineteenth-century travellers searched for Pella using Livy's description; the first excavation was made by G. Oikonomos in 1914–15, systematic exploration began in 1953, and work by the Greek Archaeological Service from 1957 uncovered large, well-built houses with colonnaded courts and mosaic floors showing a lion hunt and Dionysus riding a panther.

A lead scroll found in 1986, the Pella curse tablet, carries a curse in a distinct Doric idiom dated to about 375–350 BC and has been put forward as a strong argument that Ancient Macedonian was a variety of Northwest Greek. In February 2006 a farmer accidentally uncovered the largest tomb ever found in Greece, dated to the 2nd or 3rd century BC, with the names of a noble Macedonian family still legible on its inscriptions. About a thousand tombs have been opened since 2000; among the 37 found in 2010 was a 6th-century BC warrior buried with a bronze helmet with a gold mouthplate. Much of the palace has been excavated since 2011 and parts of it restored from 2017; it opened to the public in December 2025, and many finds are displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Pella.