GROTTA: THE CITY BURIED BENEATH NAXOS TOWN

Most archaeological sites are set apart from daily life — fenced, elevated, clearly separated from the modern world by a ticket booth and a car park. Grotta is the opposite. It occupies the northern seafront of Naxos Town (Chora), directly beneath Mitropoleos Square, tangled into the foundations of the harbour-front cafés and the narrow lanes of the Bourgos quarter, and spilling out under the waves of the small bay that shares its name. It is, by a wide margin, the longest continuously significant archaeological site on the island: traces of activity here stretch back to the Late Neolithic, around 4500 BC, and continue through the Early Cycladic, Middle and Late Bronze Age, Geometric, Byzantine and medieval periods, right up to the working Cycladic town that still occupies the site today. Grotta is less a ruin than a palimpsest — a place written over, again and again, for six and a half thousand years.

From Neolithic Village to Naming a Culture

The earliest confirmed traces at Grotta date to the Late Neolithic, roughly 4500 BC, making this stretch of coastline one of the very first places on Naxos where a settled community, rather than passing foragers or quarry-workers, is archaeologically attested. By the Early Cycladic period, beginning around 3200 BC, Grotta had grown into a settlement significant enough that it gave its name to archaeology itself: the "Grotta-Pelos" culture is one of the standard chronological phases used across the entire Cycladic world to describe the earliest stage of Early Bronze Age island culture, alongside sites like Pelos on Milos. Very few places anywhere in the Aegean have lent their name to an entire archaeological period; that Grotta did so reflects just how early and how substantial its role was in the emergence of the wider Cycladic civilisation, the culture perhaps best known today for its strikingly minimal marble figurines.

The Mycenaean City: Naxos's Bronze Age Capital

Grotta's most dramatic transformation came at the very end of the Early Bronze Age, around the turn of the third to second millennium BC, when a wave of upheaval swept across the Cyclades and most of the smaller, previously flourishing island settlements were abandoned outright. Populations concentrated instead into a handful of larger, more defensible sites, and on Naxos, Grotta became not just the most important settlement but, for a time, effectively the only substantial one on the island. By the fifteenth century BC, its material culture — pottery styles, burial customs, architecture — had taken on an increasingly pronounced Mycenaean character, reflecting Naxos's deepening integration into the wider Mycenaean and, before that, Minoan-influenced trading world that connected Crete to the Cyclades and mainland Greece.

Excavations beneath Mitropoleos Square have revealed two distinct architectural phases of this Mycenaean town, referred to by archaeologists simply as Town I and Town II. Town I corresponds to the Late Helladic IIIA period, while Town II belongs to the later Late Helladic IIIC period and includes a substantial mudbrick fortification wall, still visible today, that once defended the settlement. The city's urban peak is generally placed between roughly 1450 and 1200 BC, a period during which Grotta's material record grew rich enough, and distinctive enough, that the archaeologist Andreas Vlachopoulos coined the term "Grotta phase" to describe a specific stage of Late Helladic IIIC Cycladic pottery and culture — a chronological marker now used by researchers well beyond Naxos itself to synchronise finds across the wider Aegean.

The city's likely acropolis sat on the hill now occupied by the Venetian Kastro, a striking example of a defensible high point being reused for essentially the same purpose across nearly three thousand years of Naxian history. Rich contemporary cemeteries at Aplomata and Kamini, both a short distance east of Grotta, have produced some of the most spectacular Mycenaean-era finds on the island, including gold sheet plaques from a child's burial at Kamini and gold lion appliqués from a chamber tomb at Aplomata — clear evidence of the wealth and external connections a Bronze Age elite at Grotta had access to.

After the Bronze Age: Cult, Burial and a Quiet Return

Grotta's decline as a major Mycenaean urban centre did not end its significance. In the subsequent Geometric period, the site became a focus of cult and ancestor worship, with archaeological remains including a tumulus containing Geometric-period pottery and, more strikingly, funerary markers in the form of upright stone menhirs associated with eighth and ninth-century BC tombs — a rare, tangible link between Early Iron Age burial ritual and a place that had, by then, already been continuously significant for well over three thousand years. Small-scale ceramic production also continued at the site into later periods, with excavated workshop remains including dyeing equipment and pottery kilns, evidence of an ordinary, functioning community rather than only a monumental or ceremonial one.

The long habitation record continues into Late Antiquity: the small church of Agios Nikolaos, standing on the Grotta seafront today, dates to between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, built directly over and among the far older remains beneath it — one more layer in a site where almost every century of Naxos's history has, in some form, left something behind.

A City the Sea Is Still Uncovering

Perhaps the most striking fact about Grotta is that a significant part of it is no longer on dry land at all. Over the millennia since the Bronze Age, sea levels along this stretch of coast have risen enough that a portion of the ancient settlement now lies submerged in the shallow waters of Grotta Bay, its stone wall foundations visible from the surface on a calm day and clearly traceable in aerial photography as a roughly rectangular shelf of masonry extending out from the modern shoreline. Local tradition has long suggested the Mycenaean city may have been at least partly abandoned out of fear of encroaching seawater, a theory the site's slow, ongoing submersion does little to contradict.

For decades, that underwater portion of Grotta was extremely difficult to study properly: the water is shallow, often just a few metres deep, but also exposed and frequently choppy, conditions that make conventional diving surveys slow, expensive and imprecise. That changed in 2025, when a team from the University of Patras, led by geologist Konstantinos Merkouris and working with Naxos excavation director Andreas Vlachopoulos, deployed an autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicle equipped with high-precision GPS and acoustic and photogrammetric sensors to map the submerged zone without divers or larger boats. The survey covered close to 90,000 square metres of shallow coastal water in only a few days, non-invasively documenting stone-built walls, building foundations and other architectural features lying at depths of zero to five metres — adding substantially to what is known of a settlement that, quite literally, continues to be discovered.

A Century of Excavation

Grotta's modern excavation history is almost as layered as the site itself. Serious archaeological investigation began in 1930 under the German archaeologist Georg Welter, and continued intermittently through the work of Nikolaos Kontoleon between 1949 and 1974. The most extensive and systematic excavations followed under Vassilis Lambrinoudakis, whose work between 1976 and 2001, and especially the major campaign of 1982 to 1985, exposed most of what visitors can see today beneath Mitropoleos Square, including the Mycenaean fortification wall, house remains, workshop installations and burial evidence. Andreas Vlachopoulos, who has directed research at the site more recently, has continued that work, both on land and, as the 2025 survey shows, now beneath the waves as well.

That century of layered excavation culminated in 1999 with the opening of the On-Site Archaeological Museum in Mitropoleos Square — reportedly the first museum of its kind in Greece, built directly over and around the excavated remains rather than displaying finds removed to a separate building. Visitors descend below the modern square to walk among Mycenaean house walls, workshop installations, ceramic kilns and burial markers exactly where they were unearthed, viewed through glass walkways that let the archaeology remain, quite literally, in place beneath the town that grew up on top of it.

Visiting Grotta Today

Unlike Stelida or the Kouroi of Melanes, Grotta requires no special trip out of town: it sits at the northern edge of Naxos Town itself, an easy walk from the harbour front and directly adjacent to the causeway leading out to the Portara, making it simple to combine both sites in a single stroll. The On-Site Archaeological Museum in Mitropoleos Square is the best starting point, offering a genuinely rare chance to see Mycenaean domestic architecture, ceramic workshops and burial remains in situ rather than reconstructed or removed to a display case; check current opening hours locally, as they can vary seasonally.

From there, the short walk down to Grotta Beach itself completes the picture. This small, pebbly bay, often caught by the meltemi wind that sweeps this side of the island, offers clear views across to the Portara on one side and, on a calm day with decent light, glimpses of the submerged Mycenaean wall foundations lying just beneath the surface of the shallow water — a genuinely striking way to see ancient archaeology and the modern Aegean occupying literally the same few square metres. It is not a swimming beach in the conventional sense, given the wind and the stony shore, but as a place to stand and take in over six thousand years of continuous habitation in a single view, it has few equals on Naxos.

Nearby: Completing the Picture

Grotta sits at the centre of a remarkably dense cluster of Naxian history and makes an ideal hub for a longer walk through the island's past. The Portara is a two-minute walk along the same seafront; the Venetian Kastro, likely built over the Mycenaean acropolis itself, rises just behind the town a short climb away, along with the main Archaeological Museum of Naxos, which houses many of the Cycladic figurines, Mycenaean pottery and gold finds — including material from the nearby Aplomata and Kamini cemeteries — that give the fullest picture of what Grotta's Bronze Age city actually contained. Taken together with Stelida's Palaeolithic quarry to the south-west and the Archaic marble industry of the Kouroi at Flerio inland, Grotta completes a remarkable, island-wide timeline: from the first hominins working chert on a coastal hill, through the earliest Neolithic and Cycladic villages, to the Bronze Age city whose walls still stand, in part, beneath the modern town and its harbour waters.

Most visitors arrive in Naxos Town looking for a harbour, a ferry, or a place to eat dinner by the water, with little idea that they are standing directly above, and sometimes swimming beside, one of the most continuously significant archaeological sites in the Cyclades. Grotta doesn't announce itself with a dramatic silhouette the way the Portara does, or an obvious "wow" moment the way the Kouroi do. Its power is quieter and, in a sense, more complete: a single stretch of coastline, inhabited without real interruption for six and a half thousand years, still slowly giving up new pieces of itself to archaeologists today.