Underground Treasure

You would expect a modern subway to feature sleek trains and clean, efficient stations. You probably wouldn’t expect it to house museum-quality art, but that’s what you get at Syntagma Station in the center of Athens. Syntagma and other stations are showcases for artifacts discovered during construction of two new lines on the Athens Metro between 1992 and 2003.

The expansion of the system, managed by Bechtel, was one of the most ambitious public works projects in Greek history. And building an 80-kilometer-per-hour railway beneath a busy city was made even more complicated by the remnants of that history. Before they turned a centimeter of soil, the Athens Metro’s engineers met with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture to determine which points along the planned subway route were likely to be archaeologically significant. While historians searched for clues among the ancient writings of Herodotus, engineers used georadar, a process that makes underground images by sending energy into the earth and interpreting reflections.

Both forms of detective work helped pinpoint sites containing man-made objects. The result was the most extensive archaeological excavation ever to take place under a modern city—an effort that yielded thousands of artifacts, including a marble statue of the goddess Athena and the remains of a prized hunting dog, complete with jewel-studded leash.

Many of the objects are now exhibited in Athens’ Cycladic Arts Museum, but others are on display in the metro stations themselves. Glass-enclosed stratigraphs, including the 42-meter display in the Syntagma station, show skeletons and bowls layered in the soil exactly as they were found.

Where else in the world can you have a museum experience on your way home from work?