Olbia Pontica: A Milesian Apoikia between Tradition and Interaction (15 min)

Presenters

Alla V. Buiskykh, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; and Jochen Fornasier, Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg

Abstract

The Milesian apoikia Olbia on the lower banks of the Bug (today: Ukraine) is a prime example for the complex intercultural phenomenon of a "small world" on the threshold to the Scythian-controlled steppe region. The Greek colonists fundamentally reorganized the territory, which had been largely settlement-free until their arrival at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., by organizing not only the actual urban center but also an impressively efficient infrastructure of the surrounding chora with its more than 100 agricultural settlements. They used the mechanisms for the establishment of a Greek polis that were well known to them from the Mediterranean world: sacral spaces to guard the settlement boundaries, urban planning, traditional political structure, integration of a chora. Also, from the very beginning the colonists were engaged in a lively cultural as well as economic exchange with the Scythian population in the northwestern Pontic region, which was equally to exert a frequently demonstrable influence on the protagonists involved. Thus, in the indigenous context (e.g., in Nemirov or Bilsk hillforts), early East Greek pottery products or in the Greek apoikia itself the adaptation of indigenous building forms (so-called dug-outs) testify to these cross-links. A little later jointly used extraurban sanctuaries of Olbia (e.g., Cape Beykush) and the usage of obviously bilaterally accepted means of payment (arrowhead and dolphin money), which did not exist in the Mediterranean, are evidence of a steadily increasing material and immaterial interaction between Greeks and Scythians. Olbia was the heart of this "Small World" in the lower Bug area and, on the other hand, acted at the same time as a multifunctional hinge for traditions and innovations between the Greek Mediterranean and the Scythian steppe areas.