Philippi

The area around Philippi, at the foot of Mount Orbelos, now Mount Lekani, had been inhabited since the Neolithic period, at the site of Dikili Tash. The city itself begins in 360/359 BC, when colonists from Thasos founded a town in Thrace called Crenides, "Fountains", about 13 km north-west of Kavala on the northern edge of a marsh that in antiquity covered the plain up to the Pangaion Hills. Threatened by the Thracians in 356 BC, the colonists appealed to Philip II of Macedon; reading the economic and strategic worth of the place, he took it, fortified it and gave it his own name.

What the Macedonians wanted was the neighbouring gold mines and a garrison on a strategic passage, since the site controlled the road between Amphipolis and Neapolis, part of the royal route across Macedonia that the Roman Republic rebuilt in the 2nd century BC as a stretch of the Via Egnatia. Philip's fortifications partly blocked the gap between swamp and mountain, he sent colonists to occupy the town, and Theophrastus (c. 371 to c. 287 BC) records that he also had the marsh partly drained. Further gold mines discovered at Asyla added to the wealth of the kingdom, and Philip established a mint in the city. Philippi kept its autonomy within Macedon and its own institutions, among them the Assembly of the demos, and was fully absorbed into the kingdom only in the last years of the reign of Philip V (221 to 179 BC) or under Perseus.

When Rome destroyed the Antigonid dynasty in the Third Macedonian War in 168 BC and split the kingdom into four separate states, it was Amphipolis rather than Philippi that became the capital of the eastern one. Almost nothing is known of the city in the period that followed; its traces are the walls, the Greek theatre, house foundations later buried under the Roman forum, and a small temple to the ktistes, the foundation hero, covering the tomb of a man named Exekestos.

The city returns to the written record during the Liberators' civil war of 43 to 42 BC that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. In October 42 BC, Caesar's heirs Mark Antony and Octavian confronted the forces of the assassins Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus on the plain west of the city, and won this final battle against the partisans of the Republic. Some of their veteran soldiers, probably from Legion XXVIII, were released immediately afterwards to colonise the town, refounded as Colonia Victrix Philippensium. Octavian later reorganised the colony and brought in more settlers, veterans possibly from the Praetorian Guard along with other Italians; reckoned the city's second founder after Philip II, he gave it his family name, first as Colonia Iulia Philippensis and then as Colonia Augusta Iulia Philippensis after the Senate granted him the title Augustus in January 27 BC.

The territory was centuriated, divided into squares of land and distributed to the colonists, who occupied not only the town but villages and rural estates across a territorium covering most of what are now the Drama and Kavala districts. The city kept its Macedonian walls, and its plan was altered only in part, by a forum built a little east of the Greek agora. Under the municipal law of Rome and governed by two military officers, the duumviri, appointed directly from Rome, it was a miniature Rome in Macedonia. The Via Egnatia ran in by the Amphipolis gate and out by the Neapolis gate, and a second road began here for Siris, Heraclea Sintica and ancient Serdica.

The colony's privileged position on that route rested on the mines, and its monuments are imposing for so small an urban area. The forum, laid out on two terraces either side of the main road, was built in several phases between the reigns of Claudius (41 to 54) and Antoninus Pius (138 to 161); the theatre was enlarged to hold Roman games; and an abundance of Latin inscriptions testifies to the city's prosperity.

The New Testament records a visit by the apostle Paul during his second missionary journey, likely in AD 49 or 50. On the basis of the Acts of the Apostles and the letter to the Philippians, early Christians concluded that Paul had founded their community. Accompanied by Silas, by Timothy and possibly by Luke, he is believed to have preached for the first time on European soil here, leading to the conversion and baptism of Lydia of Thyatira, a merchant in purple textiles. Two further visits are placed in 56 and 57, and the Epistle to the Philippians, dating from around 61 to 62, is generally assumed to show the immediate effects of his instruction. A letter sent to the community by Polycarp of Smyrna around AD 160, together with funerary inscriptions, marks the growth of the church there.

The first church described in the city is a small building that probably began as a prayer-house. Known as the Basilica of Paul from a mosaic inscription in its pavement, it is dated to around 343 by a mention from Bishop Porphyrios, who attended the Council of Serdica that year; despite Philippi having one of the oldest congregations in Europe, a bishopric is attested only from the 4th century. The prosperity of the 5th and 6th centuries was attributed to Paul and to his ministry, and seven different churches were built between the middle of the 4th century and the end of the 6th, some competing in size and decoration with the finest buildings of Thessalonica and of Constantinople. Basilica B, whose plan and decoration relate to Hagia Sophia and Saint Irene in Constantinople, holds a privileged place in the history of early Christian art, and the complex cathedral raised around an octagonal church that replaced the Basilica of Paul at the end of the 5th century likewise rivalled the churches of the capital.

In the same age the Empire rebuilt the fortifications against growing instability in the Balkans. In 473 Ostrogothic troops under Theodoric Strabo besieged Philippi; they failed to take it, but burned down the surrounding villages. The Slavic invasions at the end of the 6th century ruined the agrarian economy of Macedonia, the Plague of Justinian in 547 probably weakened the city as well, and an earthquake around 619 almost totally destroyed it. It never recovered. A little activity continued into the 7th century, though the place was by then hardly more than a village, and disasters and raids drove the population out of the urban centre, leaving a fortress that held its importance from its position on the main east-west land route.

A Byzantine garrison was possibly maintained there, but in 838 the Bulgarians under kavhan Isbul took the city and celebrated the victory with a monumental inscription cut on the stylobate of Basilica B. The Byzantines attempted to recapture the site around 850, and seals of civil servants and other officials from the first half of the 9th century prove that Byzantine armies were present. Around 969 the Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas rebuilt the fortifications of the acropolis and part of the city, work that gradually helped to weaken Bulgar power and to strengthen the Byzantine presence in the area, and in 1077 Bishop Basil Kartzimopoulos rebuilt part of the defences inside the walls. The city began to prosper again, and the Arab geographer Al Idrisi mentioned it as a centre of business and wine production around 1150.

After a brief occupation by the Franks following the Fourth Crusade and the capture of Constantinople in 1204, the city was taken by the Serbs. It remained a notable fortification on the line of the ancient Via Egnatia: in 1354 Matthew Cantacuzenus, a pretender to the Byzantine throne, was captured there by the Serbs. Total abandonment is placed in the 14th century, though no exact date is recorded for it. When the French traveller Pierre Belon passed through in the 1540s, nothing remained but ruins, which the Turks were using as a quarry. The name outlived the city, surviving first in a Turkish village on the nearby plain, Philibedjik or "Little Filibe", now gone, and then in a Greek village in the mountains.

Earlier travellers had noted the ruins in passing, but the first modern archaeological description came out of a visit made in 1856 and was published in 1860 by Georges Perrot, followed in 1861 by the fuller investigations of the French Mission Archéologique de Macédoine under the archaeologist Léon Heuzey and the architect Honoré Daumet. The École française d'Athènes began excavating in the summer of 1914, broke off during the First World War, resumed in 1920 and carried on until 1937, clearing the Greek theatre, the forum, Basilicas A and B, the baths and the walls. Greek archaeologists returned after the Second World War, and a large quantity of finds came to light in 1962. Between 1958 and 1978 the Archaeological Society of Athens, followed by the Greek Archaeological Service and the University of Thessalonica, uncovered the bishop's quarter and the octagonal church, large private residences, a basilica near the Museum and two more in the necropolis east of the city.

The Archaeological Service, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the French School continue the excavation, and the finds are shown in the Archaeological Museum of Philippi. Restoration has been carried out on most of the monuments, with a consolidation programme for the ancient theatre set up under a European scheme of 1994 for historic buildings and performance venues. The present village of Filippoi lies beside the ruins, within Kavala in the region of East Macedonia and Thrace. On 15 July 2016, at its 40th session in Istanbul, UNESCO inscribed the archaeological site on the World Heritage List for its exceptional Roman architecture, for an urban layout that reflects Rome itself on a smaller scale, and for its importance in early Christianity.