The “Dragon Houses” of Ancient Greece
What these mystery monuments reveal about the ancient world
And so it seems another archaeological site (this time, technically, twenty of them) hints at the same thing countless other sites have hinted at: that the stars played a primary role in the lives of ancient people the world over.
Allow me to introduce you to the dragon houses of ancient Greece.
These are a series of mysterious stone structures with open doors and small circular roof openings (presumably to let in light), varying in size and state of preservation, only ever found on Greece’s second-largest island, Euboea.
And by mysterious, I’m not just hyping them up for nothing. No one knows where the stones came from. No one knows who built the houses. No one knows when they were built or what they were built for.
They’re not mentioned in any ancient Greek, or even Roman or medieval, texts. In fact, they’re not mentioned by anyone, anywhere, until 1797, in part likely owing to the fact that they’re perched on the sides of some of Euboea’s highest mountains.
Excavations of the sites, too, have yielded little; lots of pottery shards, some utensils, animal bones, and reportedly a few fragments of inscriptions, though the details of these are so wholly…
