1,200 antiquities from the “land of lakes”

It took 334 pages to fit the history of the “land of lakes and sleeping waters”, the place where “the king of rivers” dominates according to Homer, the primitive Titan and elder brother of 3,000 rivers, Acheloos, from whose water the first wine was made , when the mythical king Oeneas mixed it with grape juice? The land bathed by a sea – a miniature of the Mediterranean, whose waters mingle with 20 lagoons and two rivers – and where in its 140 caves gods, heroes, demigods, rivers, demons and nymphs were worshiped?

And can 1,200 antiquities depict life thousands of years ago in the largest prefecture of Greek territory today, Aetoloakarnania? Where in the past wrote their own pages in history on one side of Acheloos the great and “the unshakable in battle Aetolians”, the compatriots of the mother of the Dioscuri and the Beautiful Helen, Leto, the most powerful Greek – even the seven-time Olympian Milon Crotoniatiswhom had  recognized as his superior and on the other hand the honest and freedom loving Akarnanes with the great cities, the high know-how in the construction of fortifications and dams?

It is enough to browse the elegant and luxurious volume “Xenokration – The Archaeological Museum of the Holy City of Messolonghi”, the 20th volume of the publishing program “The cycle of museums” carried out with the support of Lamda Development edited by Olkos and prefaced by the minister of Culture Lina Mendoni. The volume will travel readers to the past of Aetoloakarnania through the scientifically documented, but also attractively written texts of the archaeologist and head of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Aetoloakarnania and Lefkada, Olympia Vikatou, accompanied by the photographs of Socrates Mavromatis.

The pages of this edition give the reader another opportunity: to “visit” before the public opening (on Saturday) the brand new museum of Messolonghi – the fourth in the prefecture after those of Thermo, Agrinio and Thyrreio. A museum that aims to function as an ark of the History of Aetolia and Acarnania in the neoclassical building that 136 years ago the brothers Xenocrates (Theodoros, Athanasios, Constantine and Paschalis) donated as a girls’ school in the heroic city of Messolonghi.

The Soothsayer and the Astronomer

In the long and rich in finds of every kind the route the reader-visitor meets the last Mycenaean warrior who was buried in its soil together with his long bronze gilded sword, the short sword with the ivory handle, its bronze grieves and a golden cylix. He knows Mantis Megistias, who predicted the defeat of Leonidas at Thermopylae, but did not leave the battlefield, but also the astronomer-astrologer Agaios, whom Jason chose as the ruler of the mythical Argos. The Akarnanian Lefkaros who shaped the art of the pancratium according to Aristotle and Xenarkis, the first Akarnana Olympian, whose statue was made by Lysippos.

It traverses the earth with its six theaters with a capacity of 4,500 to 6,000 seats. The place where Apollo was worshiped, Artemis – from Thermo where the oldest examples of monumental paintings are preserved to Aktio, where Aeneas is said to have offered a Greek shield that he had brought with him from Troy and from where two kouros have emigrated and are at the Louvre – and Poseidon. The first and only stadium located in Western Greece is located in the sanctuary of the latter at Elliniko Velvina.

It introduces the country whose inhabitants lived under arms day and night as they never managed to persevere – the only time they signed an alliance treaty (260-250 BC) it was not observed – and where one part of them, the Aetolians, were defiled by Thucydides as uncivilized, by Aristophanes as greedy and by Euripides as mixed barbarians because they defeated the Athenians at the battle of Aegitius in 426 BC. And the lands where cities were born in the markets of which there were even 2,000 statues (such as Thermo) and the institution of the Confederation was developed as a model of a common state.

The new round of the “Circle of Museums” – which was inspired by the vice president of Lamda Development Vangelis Chronis – was renewed for 2022 starring the new Archaeological Museum of Chalkida “Arethousa” and author the head of the Ephorate of Evia, Angeliki Simosi.