Ilot urbain grec du Collège du Vieux-Port
MonumentHidden Treasure
Beneath the heart of Marseilles, a 2,600-year-old Greek island emerges from the ground: adobe walls with painted plasterwork, monumental basements and banqueting crockery, shattering vestiges of the original Massalia.
History
In the heart of Marseille's Old Port, where the city of Marseilles took root almost twenty-six centuries ago, a rectangle measuring seventeen metres on each side contains one of the most moving archaeological testimonies to French urban prehistory. The Greek islet of the Collège du Vieux-Port is not a reconstructed monument or a museographic display: it is the very flesh of Massalia, the city founded by Greek colonists from Phocaea in Asia Minor, frozen in its stratigraphic layers like a stone book open to the page of origins. What immediately strikes the initiated visitor is the density of time accumulated in so little space. The streets that encircle the block, made up of successive layers of gravel, convey the image of a lively, regularly-maintained district in which the inhabitants of Massalia moved, traded and celebrated their gods. Here we can see the implacable logic of the Hippodamian plan, the orthogonal grid that the Greeks applied to their colonies to signify the order of the city in the chaos of the world. The richness of the site also lies in the exceptional state of preservation of some of the masonry. Adobe brick walls still rise to a height of one and a half metres, in some places retaining their original painted renderings - a detail that is enough to distinguish this site from most Mediterranean archaeological sites, where perishable materials have long since disappeared. The colour, even when muted by the passage of time, harkens back to a Greek domesticity that was thought to have been lost forever beneath the concrete of France's second-largest city. For the curious visitor, contemplating these remains invites a rare exercise: imagining Marseille before Marseille, a child-town laid out squarely on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean, whose inhabitants imported oil, wine and ceramics from the Aegean and exported their own products to the Celto-Ligurian peoples of the hinterland. Archaeology never speaks as loudly as when it whispers. Classified as a Historic Monument in 2009, the islet is part of a wider series of archaeological discoveries made in the area around the Old Port, making Marseille one of the best-documented French cities of the Archaic and Classical Greek period. A visit here is an ideal complement to a visit to the MUCEM and the Musée d'Histoire de Marseille, where the objects unearthed in this area have their context and their brilliance restored.
Architecture
The urban layout of the block is remarkably coherent for a settlement from the Archaic period. Bounded by streets with successive gravel fillings - this repeated raising process reflects regular maintenance of the roads over several generations - it forms a square with sides measuring around seventeen metres, a modular unit that could correspond to a primitive cadastral division of the Phocaean colony. The earliest phase of construction illustrates domestic architecture typical of the western Greek world: walls of hand-moulded, sun-dried adobe bricks are raised on local limestone flashings to insulate them from the dampness of the ground. The exceptional state of preservation of some of the walls, which are still 1.50 metres high, has made it possible to find shreds of painted plaster in place - an extremely rare detail for a site of this age in mainland France, reminiscent of the colourful interiors of Greek houses such as those in Olynth or Priene. The monumental construction that followed in the middle of the 6th century introduced a significant change in scale. The large blocks of cut limestone, assembled in a pseudo-isodomous structure, form a bipartite base whose mass and regularity contrast with the surrounding light constructions. This sudden monumentalisation, combined with the associated archaeological finds of a cultic or symposiac nature, suggests an ambitious architectural programme, perhaps linked to the assertion of Massalia's civic identity at a time when the colony was seeking to establish itself as a regional power.
Related Figures
Les Phocéens fondateurs de Massalia (vers 600 av. J.-C.)Protis, légendaire co-fondateur grec de Massalia selon la tradition antiqueGyptis, princesse ligure dont l'union avec Protis aurait scellé la fondation de Marseille selon le récit de JustinPythéas de Massalia, explorateur et géographe grec du IVe siècle av. J.-C., enfant de la citéArchéologues de l'INRAP ayant conduit les fouilles préventives du Vieux-Port
