Vergina: the royal tombs of Macedon

The village of Vergina was founded in 1922 by refugees from the Black Sea region. It lies about 13 km from the town of Veria. Beside it are the ruins of a much older place, Αἰγαί (Aigai), the first capital of the kingdom of Macedon. In 1968 the historian Nicholas Hammond identified these ruins as Aigai, and most researchers now accept this.

Around 400 BC or some decades later (scholars disagree) the government of the kingdom moved to Pella, but Aigai stayed the royal burial place and a ceremonial centre. The historian Diodorus (19.52) says that Cassander buried King Philip Arrhidaeus and Queen Eurydice there, «καθάπερ ἔθος ἦν τοῖς βασιλεῦσι», as was the custom for the kings. In 336 BC Philip II was murdered in the theatre of Aigai, next to his palace, and his son Alexander was proclaimed king in the city. In 168 BC the Romans destroyed Aigai.

The cemetery of Aigai has 530 burial mounds, according to the Greek Ministry of Culture. A burial mound is a τύμβος. The largest, the Great Tumulus, or Μεγάλη Τούμπα in Greek, was 110 metres across and 13 metres high.

It was not there from the start. Plutarch (Pyrrhus 26) tells how King Pyrrhus took Aigai and left a garrison of Gauls in the city. They dug up the graves of the kings, took the treasure and scattered the bones, τὰ ὀστᾶ. The Ministry dates this to 276/5 BC, but Pyrrhus's campaign in Macedon is usually dated to about 274 BC. Afterwards a king, possibly Antigonus Gonatas, seems to have covered the tombs that were still untouched with a huge pile of earth.

Manolis Andronikos, of the University of Thessaloniki, dug into this mound. On 8 November 1977 he entered a vaulted tomb that thieves had never reached. The excavation of the mound ended in 1980.

• Tomb I: a simple stone-lined grave, robbed in antiquity, with a wall painting of the abduction of Persephone.
• Tomb II: vaulted, with two rooms and a painted frieze 5.56 metres long on the front. It was found unrobbed.
• Tomb III: also unrobbed, with the bones of a teenager. It is called the Tomb of the Prince and is often linked to Alexander IV, which is debated.
• Tomb IV: mostly in ruins.

In the main room of Tomb II, a gold casket, a λάρναξ, held a man's burnt bones, wrapped in purple cloth. Homer already uses the word for Hector's bones: «χρυσείην ἐς λάρνακα» (Iliad 24.795). The Ministry gives it 7,820 grams of hammered gold and a 16-rayed star on the lid. A gold oak wreath has 313 leaves and 68 acorns. In the front room, a second gold casket held a woman's bones. The star is often linked to the royal house of Macedon, but similar stars exist elsewhere: a 5th-century BC amulet reported from Sozopol, on the Black Sea, has one with eight rays.

Andronikos attributed Tomb II to Philip II, and the Ministry still calls it the Tomb of Philip II. Others have proposed Philip's son Arrhidaeus and his wife, Adea Eurydice. The debate has lasted decades:

• A team led by Theodore Antikas put the man's age at about 45 and the woman's at about 32. Her left shin had been broken, and one of the leg guards found in her room is 3.5 cm shorter than the other.
• In 2015 a study led by Antonis Bartsiokas argued that a knee injury in the man of Tomb I matches Philip's limp, which would place Philip in Tomb I and Arrhidaeus in Tomb II. According to the writer David Grant, another scholar has questioned whether those bones really come from Tomb I.
• David Grant reported in 2020 that permission for DNA tests on the bones of Tombs II and III had been refused.

The mound itself no longer exists. A structure built in 1993 looks like a mound from outside and protects the tombs, and the treasures have been on show there since November 1997. The palace of Aigai, built under Philip II, reopened in January 2024 after a 16-year restoration.