Madytos (Thrace)

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Madytos (or Maitos, or Madyta, Gr. Μάδυτος), by the modern town of Eceabat in Turkey, was an ancient Greek[1] city and port of Thrace, located in the region of the Thracian Chersonesos.

The city was a colony of the Aeolians from Lesbos who, according to the ancient authors, founded also Sestos and Alopekonessos and other cities of the Hellespont.[2][3]

This was part of the Greek colonization movement of the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Later more colonists came from the Greek Ionian cities of Miletus and Clazomenae. Archaeological evidence also supports Aeolian or possibly Athenian origin of colonists.[4]

Madytos is referred by Herodotus in relation to the Persian Wars,[5] and by Thucydides in relation to the Battle of the Eurymedon.

Madytos was an active commercial port during the Byzantine period and the Middle Ages.[6] It was occupied by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th-century. The city continued to have a mainly Greek population until the 1920s when, after the Treaty of Lausanne and the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey, most of the Greeks moved to Greece, where they founded the town of Nea Madytos.

See also

  • Greek colonies in Thrace

References

  1. ↑ Mogens Herman Hansen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis: An Investigation Conducted by The Copenhagen Polis Centre for the Danish National Research Foundation 2004, p. 1019.
  2. ↑ Pseudo-Scymnus (705-10), see: Scymni Chii Periegesis. Edition S.G. Teubner, 1846, Lipsiae. p. 40, available online http://my.qoop.com/google/mM2tt4TSVOQC/
  3. ↑ Benjamin H. Isaac (1986) The Greek settlements in Thrace until the Macedonian Conquest, Ed. E.J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, p. 161.
  4. ↑ Loukopoulou L. (2004) Thracian Chersonesos, in M. H. Hansen & T. H. Nielsen, Eds. (2004) An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, Oxford University Press, p. 900.
  5. ↑ Herodotus of Halikarnassus, The Histories, Book 7 (Polymnia), 30.
  6. ↑ W. Heyd (1885) Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age, Ed. Emile Lechevauer, Paris, 1885, p. 284.

Coordinates: 40°11′02″N 26°21′23″E / 40.183889°N 26.356389°E / 40.183889; 26.356389

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