Καλλιθέας - Αφύτου

Καλλιθέας - Αφύτου sits on the Greek coast, where pines run down to a beach of gold sand. Behind them stand hotels, tavernas and a ribbon of coastal road. Refugees from Maltepe on the Sea of Marmara and from Pontus founded the village after the Asia Minor catastrophe. Before their arrival, the fields belonged to a monastic estate managed by a Russian monastery on Mount Athos.

The oldest layers of this shore lie beneath the sand. Archaeologists uncovered a sanctuary cut into the rock and dedicated to Dionysus and the nymphs. A carved staircase and a cave used for rituals reach back to the earliest centuries of Greek worship. Later layers belong to Zeus Ammon: the remains of a large Doric temple and a prominent classical altar. Romans left a bathhouse here too, and parts of it have come to light. Many of these discoveries appeared during hotel construction in the nineteen-sixties, when builders and archaeologists first shared the same ground.

Two further sights wait a short walk away. An early Christian basilica preserves a mosaic of two deer. A small Russian-style church of Saint Panteleimon with modern frescoes stands beside a hotel. Even a nineteenth-century irrigation channel survives in stone pillars, a quiet trace of the village's farming past. One detail stays with you: the staircase in the rock, where footsteps from three thousand years ago meet the waves.