APLOMATA & KAMINI: THE CEMETERIES BEHIND NAXOS'S GOLD

Just east of Grotta, on the northern edge of Naxos Town, two unassuming low hills sit beneath what is today an entirely ordinary stretch of Chora's residential streets. There is no dramatic ruin here, no standing wall or marble colonnade to draw the eye. Yet Aplomata and Kamini, as these two hills are known, were the principal burial grounds of Naxos's Mycenaean elite for several centuries during the Late Bronze Age — and between them, they have produced nearly all of the gold, and much of the finest painted pottery, now on display in the Archaeological Museum of Naxos. If Grotta was the city, Aplomata and Kamini were where that city buried, and honoured, its most important people.

The Cemeteries of a Mycenaean Capital

Aplomata and Kamini sit a short distance east of the Mycenaean city excavated beneath modern Naxos Town's Mitropoleos Square, the settlement now generally known simply as Grotta. As that city grew into the dominant urban centre of Naxos during the Late Helladic period, roughly the 14th to 12th centuries BC, its inhabitants needed somewhere to bury their dead — and, like most Mycenaean communities, they chose ground close to, but physically separate from, the settlement itself. Aplomata lies closer to Grotta; Kamini sits somewhat further to the east. Both hills functioned as formal cemeteries throughout the city's Mycenaean heyday, and archaeologists studying the site today treat the three locations, city and both cemeteries together, as a single interconnected unit for understanding how Bronze Age Naxos actually lived, worked and buried its people.

A Burial Ground Long Before the Mycenaeans

Aplomata's history as a place of burial actually predates the Mycenaean period by well over a thousand years. Among the finds recovered from the hill is a marble pyxis, a small lidded container, dated to the Early Cycladic period between roughly 2800 and 2300 BC — solid evidence that this same rise of ground was already being used for burial in the era of the famous Cycladic marble figurines, long before Mycenaean Greece existed in any recognisable form. That continuity, a single hillside serving as sacred burial ground across close to two thousand years of prehistory, is a pattern that recurs again and again across Naxos's archaeological landscape, echoing the similarly long, layered history documented at Grotta itself.

Chamber Tombs Cut Into the Rock

The defining burial type at both Aplomata and Kamini is the Mycenaean chamber tomb: a burial chamber cut directly into the natural rock, typically approached by a sloping entrance passage, and designed, unlike a single-use grave, for repeated use by the same family or kin group over multiple generations, with earlier burials and grave goods pushed aside to make room for later interments. At Aplomata, archaeological investigation has identified several such rock-cut chamber tombs along with a number of less standardised, "uncanonical" burials that don't neatly fit the typical chamber-tomb pattern — a reminder that Mycenaean burial custom, even within a single cemetery, was rarely perfectly uniform.

Two Hills, Two Clans?

One of the more intriguing interpretive questions raised by Aplomata and Kamini concerns the clear physical separation between them. Rather than a single continuous burial ground, the Mycenaean-era dead of Naxos were divided between two distinct hills, each maintained and used across multiple generations. Researchers studying the pattern have suggested this separation may reflect the presence of two competing elite clans, or kin groups, who together held power over Mycenaean Naxos — each burying its own dead, and very possibly asserting its own status through the wealth of its grave goods, on its own dedicated hillside a short distance from the other. It's an interpretation that can't be proven definitively from burial evidence alone, but it fits a broader pattern seen elsewhere in the Mycenaean world, where competing elite lineages within a single settlement often maintained visibly separate cemeteries as a form of ongoing social and political statement.

What Came Out of the Ground

The quality and quantity of material recovered from these two hillsides is, by the standards of Cycladic archaeology, genuinely exceptional. From Kamini came one of the single most striking finds anywhere on Naxos: four thin gold sheet plaques, crafted specifically for the rich burial of a child and shaped to depict the child themselves, dated to the Late Mycenaean period around the 12th century BC and now held in the Archaeological Museum of Naxos. Also from Kamini came a Mycenaean strainer hydria, a water jug fitted with an internal filter, decorated with a painted scene of a circular dance — a rare and evocative glimpse of Mycenaean social or ritual life rendered directly onto a burial offering.

Aplomata's chamber tombs proved equally rich. Chamber tomb A alone produced three gold sheet appliqués in the shape of lions, alongside a fine Late Helladic IIIC stirrup jar decorated in the so-called "octopus style," a distinctive Naxian variant of the marine-motif pottery associated with the broader Late Mycenaean world. Together with the Early Cycladic marble pyxis mentioned earlier, these finds span an extraordinary breadth of Naxos's prehistory recovered from a single, modest hillside.

A Roman Postscript

Aplomata's significance did not end with the close of the Bronze Age. Excavation at the site has also revealed traces of Roman-period activity, including a mosaic floor fragment depicting a Nereid, one of the sea-nymph daughters of the god Nereus, riding on the back of a bull — a decorative theme popular in Roman-era domestic and funerary art across the Aegean. The presence of this later material confirms that the hill continued to hold some significance, whether residential, religious or otherwise, well over a thousand years after its Mycenaean chamber tombs had gone out of use, adding one more layer to a site whose occupation history already stretched back to the Early Cycladic period.

A Six-Decade Excavation Story

Serious archaeological investigation of Aplomata began under Nikolaos Kontoleon, who had already been excavating at Grotta and at the sanctuary of Gyroulas since 1949, and who extended his work to the neighbouring cemetery hill in subsequent seasons. Vassilis Lambrinoudakis, later to become one of the most significant figures in Naxian archaeology — leading the eventual restoration projects at both the Temple of Demeter and the Sanctuary of Dionysus at Yria — joined Kontoleon's team as a student in 1961, working specifically at Grotta and at the "Early Cycladic-Mycenaean cemetery on the neighbouring hills of Aplomata," in his own later description of the project. Lambrinoudakis continued working alongside Kontoleon until 1975, at which point he took over direction of the excavations himself, a role he would go on to hold across Naxos for decades to come. The formal scholarly publication of the Aplomata material followed in 1977, when the archaeologist Chrysoula Kardara published a dedicated monograph on the portable finds recovered from two of the site's chamber tombs, labelled Tombs A and B, cementing Aplomata's place in the wider academic literature on Mycenaean Cycladic archaeology.

Visiting Aplomata & Kamini Today

It's worth being clear-eyed about what a visit to Aplomata and Kamini actually involves: unlike Grotta, whose Mycenaean remains are partly visible beneath Mitropoleos Square, or the Portara, standing openly on the harbour, the two cemetery hills themselves sit beneath the ordinary residential fabric of modern Naxos Town, without a dedicated on-site archaeological park, fenced excavation area, or visitor infrastructure of their own. For the overwhelming majority of visitors, the way to actually experience Aplomata and Kamini is not to visit the hills directly, but to see the finds themselves, normally displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Naxos within the Kastro. The museum has, at times in recent years, undergone renovation as part of a wider "Islet of Museums" redevelopment project, with a temporary exhibition shown elsewhere in the Kastro in the meantime, so it's worth checking current opening arrangements locally before planning a visit specifically around this material; the gold plaques, lion appliqués, painted stirrup jar and dance-scene hydria from Aplomata and Kamini are, in whichever configuration they're currently displayed, very much worth seeking out.

Nearby: Completing Mycenaean Naxos

Aplomata and Kamini make the most sense read alongside the rest of Naxos's Mycenaean-era story, elsewhere in this series. Grotta, the city these two cemeteries served, sits a short walk away along the same stretch of coastline, its own Mycenaean fortification walls and workshop remains visible beneath Mitropoleos Square; the Kastro, believed to occupy the site of the city's acropolis, rises on the hill just above; and the Archaeological Museum inside it houses, in one place, the physical evidence recovered from all three locations — city, citadel and cemetery — that together reconstruct a genuinely detailed picture of what Bronze Age life on Naxos actually looked like.

Most of Naxos's great monuments announce themselves as ruins to be walked through. Aplomata and Kamini do the opposite: they are almost entirely invisible today, built over by the very town whose Bronze Age ancestors they once served, their significance legible now only in a museum case rather than on the ground itself. But it is precisely because these two quiet hillsides were dug up, studied and published, rather than simply built over unnoticed, that anyone today can hold in mind a genuinely vivid picture of a Naxian child's gold-covered burial, or a jug painted with dancers, made by hands working on this island well over three thousand years ago.