Abdera

Listen first. Out here, the loudest sound is often the wind coming off the Aegean, pushing through dry grass and low scrub. Underfoot, the ground is uneven, a mix of packed earth, loose stones and the edges of old foundations. Look closely and those foundations form lines. Walls, corners, the outline of rooms. You are standing in what was once a Greek city on the coast of Thrace, a place that gave the ancient world some of its sharpest minds.

Thrace was the wide region north of the Aegean Sea. Today it is split between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. In ancient times, Greeks saw it as a rough frontier, home to Thracian tribes known for horses and gold. Abdera sat on this edge. It was a Greek city facing the sea, with Thracian lands at its back. That position shaped everything about it: its trade, its wars, and its wealth.

The ancients told a dark story about how the city began. Legend has it that the hero Heracles came here on one of his famous labours, to capture the man-eating mares of King Diomedes. He left his young companion, Abderus, to guard the horses. When Heracles returned, the mares had killed the boy. According to the myth, Heracles founded a city in his memory and gave it his name. It is a story, not history... but the people of Abdera told it proudly.

The historical record is plainer, and still dramatic. The Greek historian Herodotus writes that the first settlers came from Clazomenae, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey. Their leader was a man named Timesias. That first colony did not last. Herodotus says the local Thracians drove the settlers out. For a time, the site went quiet, and the coast belonged to others again.

Then, in the sixth century before Christ, a new wave arrived. They came from Teos, another Greek city in Asia Minor. The Persian Empire was advancing on their home, and rather than live under Persian rule, many Teians boarded ships and sailed away. Herodotus records that they resettled Abdera. Think about that for a moment. This city was rebuilt by refugees, people who chose exile over surrender.

The new Abdera grew rich. Its harbour served trade between the Greek world and the Thracian interior, and goods like grain, timber and metals passed through. The city struck its own silver coins, and many of them carry a griffin, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. The griffin was the emblem of Teos. The refugees carried their old home's symbol with them, and stamped it into their new wealth.

In 480 BC, the Persians came here too. King Xerxes marched his huge army along this coast on his way to invade Greece. Herodotus describes the burden this placed on the cities along the route, which had to feed the king and his troops. He also writes that Xerxes, on his retreat, stopped at Abdera and treated its people as friends. Here is a surprise. A city founded by people fleeing Persia ended up hosting the Persian king.

After the Persian wars, Abdera joined the Athenian alliance known as the Delian League. Member cities paid regular contributions to a shared treasury, and the surviving Athenian records show that Abdera paid one of the larger amounts in this northern region. That tells historians something simple and useful. In the fifth century before Christ, this was a prosperous place, and its harbour and coins mattered to the wider Greek world.

Now comes the part most visitors do not expect. This modest coastal city produced two of the most important thinkers of ancient Greece. The first was Democritus. Together with his teacher Leucippus, he developed the idea that everything is made of tiny, invisible particles that cannot be divided. The Greek word for uncuttable gives us our word atom. More than two thousand years before modern physics, someone from this shoreline was thinking in atoms.

The second was Protagoras, one of the travelling teachers called Sophists, who taught rhetoric and argument for a fee. He is remembered for a famous saying, that man is the measure of all things. It is one of the most debated lines in philosophy. Plato named one of his dialogues after him. So two very different ideas, one about the physical world, one about human judgement, both trace back to Abdera.

There is an irony here. In the ancient world, the people of Abdera had a reputation for being foolish. Roman writers used the city's name as a kind of joke, a byword for simple-minded people. Some blamed the local air. Democritus, meanwhile, became known as the laughing philosopher. According to one popular later tale, the citizens thought his laughter was madness and called on the doctor Hippocrates. Scholars treat that story as legend, but it has lasted for centuries.

The city did not stay at its height forever. Over the following centuries it passed through Macedonian and then Roman rule, and its importance slowly faded. Later, in the Byzantine era, settlement here continued on a smaller scale. Archaeologists have excavated parts of the old city over many decades, uncovering walls, houses, public buildings and burials. Many finds are kept in the archaeological museum in the modern village of Avdira, a short drive inland.

As you walk, notice how low everything is. Most of what survives here rises only a little above the ground. You will not find tall columns or a complete temple. Instead, look for the stone courses of fortification walls, the shapes of rooms, the difference between rough local stone and carefully cut blocks. Turn toward the water. The coastline has shifted over the centuries, but the sea that brought those first refugees is still right there.

Before you leave, stand still for a minute. Feel the wind again, and listen to the grass. Somewhere beneath your feet, people once argued in the market, minted silver griffins, and laughed at a philosopher who said the world was made of atoms. Now the site is quiet, open to the sky, and lightly marked. As you walk back, look down at the stones by the path. Any one of them may have been part of a wall in that city.