Olympic Legacy: Empuries 3: Greek Town: 26th March 2011

The Greek town is an earlier, yet much more compact, settlement than the Roman one. The average room size is much smaller, and whilst the Roman city is built all at right angles, the Greek town seems like a jumble of building upon building. This could indicate that there were less affluent people living here, or perhaps that the Greeks concentrated more on trade than the Romans. The Roman remains show various very large villas, which would be nearly twice 

the size of the Forum.

The name Empuries comes from the Greek emporion, which means market. Thus it is not so surprising that there were so many small shops. Like in the Roman city, the shops were all about the same size, and stretched out along the main artery of the town; both the Roman 

shopping street and the Greek shopping street seem to end at the walls.

Incidentally, it is not entirely right to assume that modern cities such as Barcelona or New York were pioneers in town planning. When we see plans of these modern cities, we see grids on the map of square blocks of buildings. It was not the first time that this had been used. the Romans were in fact using this scheme over 200 years earlier! This is why when we look at plans of Roman sites most of the city blocks are centred around two axes at a right angle which cross a square of land, and all the roads criss cross the square of land to create squares.

Here are a few images taken at the Empuries museum, objects which were recovered from the sites and preserved until today:

We had gone there wiht two things in mind: to see the ruins and to see the original mosaics. However, the moment we got there we were told that the outdoor mosaics would be uncovered the day after, because that was when the tourist season officially started apparently. I was not too happy about that! But at least I saw two pieces of mosaic, one the image above and the one below, the only outdoor mosaic we saw:

These are various jars and remains found in the ruins.