Planned Subway Threatens City’s Archeology : Athens’ Past May Intrude on Its Future

Snarled by traffic nearly around the clock, Athens is ready to start digging a $1.1-billion subway system to ease congestion and reduce pollution.

But ancient Greece could get in the way.

The new two-line, 11-mile subway to be called the Metro is designed to cut through the heart of the city, but if the tunnel diggers run into archeological ruins from classical times, they would have to stop.

Culture Ministry archeologists will monitor all digging inside the 5th-Century BC Themistoclean walls, for example, and will stop the project to excavate when necessary.

“In areas where there are ancient tombs and roads, the digging shouldn’t be problematic,” said Elisabeth Spathari, a government archeologist. “But if we find a large memorial, that could force the work schedule to change.”

Expansion Needed

But with 3.6 million people and more than 650,000 private cars in greater Athens, almost no one disputes the need to expand the capital’s current one-line subway, which dates to 1904.

Street traffic in Athens is heavy almost 24 hours a day.

“The Metro is a way of solving the traffic problem without creating a further pollution problem,” Michalis Verrios, a senior Public Works Ministry official, said in an interview.

Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou has called the Metro plan a priority in the city’s bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Preliminary tunneling to test Athens’ crumbly limestone and igneous bedrock is set for this summer, with construction expected to begin early in 1988, officials said.

Poor Bus Service, Parking

The Metro is widely seen as the best way to reduce car traffic in the cramped, five-square-mile commercial and business district, a maze of narrow one-way streets.

Bus service in Athens is slow, and limited parking forces cars and motorbikes onto the sidewalks. Exhaust from vehicles has been deemed a threat to people’s health and already has damaged the 2,500-year-old Acropolis monuments.

Government figures indicate that since 1973, the number of cars in Athens has increased by 160%, outstripping population growth 4 to 1.

The new Metro routes would crisscross with an existing 16-mile subway line that links the port of Piraeus with Athens’ northern suburbs.

One new line will run east from the ancient burial ground at Kerameikos to the Pentagon, Greece’s defense headquarters. A north-south line will connect the working-class districts of Sepolia and Daphne.

Tunnel Deep Below City

According to studies for the Metro, the subway will carry a rush-hour load of 50,000 people by 1996 and 80,000 by the year 2010, if a planned extension to Athens Airport gets built.

Metro engineers say the subway will be tunneled at a depth of 40 to 60 feet, well below the level of the classical city. But because stations must be built from the surface down, the engineers acknowledge the possibility of delays because diggers might run into something of archeological value.

Plans for a station near the remains of the massive Temple of Olympian Zeus, completed about AD 130 by the Roman emperor Hadrian, have raised concern.

“The station has to be built as far away from the temple as possible because its columns are so tall and so old,” government archeologist Spathari said. “We don’t want anything that could possibly make them topple.”

She also said that construction of a four-level station facing Parliament in Constitution Square, where the new Metro lines will meet, may reveal the precise location of the Lyceum, the 4th-Century BC philosophical school where Aristotle taught. That could be an obstacle for the subway planners.