Avdira

The Byzantine town of Polystylon occupies the acropolis of ancient Abdera, the birthplace of Democritus, and its story is one of decline from episcopal importance to abandonment around 1380. Its fortifications, raised in the seventh or eighth century AD on Classical foundations, run roughly 800 metres along the hill, with walls between 2.40 and 3.50 metres thick, reinforced by rectangular towers and an outer wall on the northwest. The historian Nikiforos Grigoras records that John Kantakouzenos repaired the upper defences in 1342, and two towers there date from his reign. Inside, an internal wall splits the town in two, while a second creates the Byzantine acropolis. Excavations have uncovered a heated bath building, a twelfth-century single-aisled church with a cemetery of wooden coffins, and the ninth-century episcopal basilica, built over an earlier three-aisled church whose cruciform baptistery survives. The bishop's quarters stand at its northwest corner, and a painted rosette within a cross, now in the Abdera museum, was found among its graves.