The Necromanteion of Ephyra: the oracle of the dead on the Acheron

In north-western Greece, where the river Acheron once flowed through a marsh before reaching the Ionian Sea, the ancients placed one of the gates to the realm of the dead. There, in the region of Thesprotia, near ancient Ephyra, stood a singular oracle: it was not the gods who were questioned, but the souls of the departed. The Greeks called it a necromanteion, an oracle of the dead, and its memory runs through literature from Homer to Pausanias.

Homer's rivers of the Underworld

In the tenth book of the Odyssey the sorceress Circe shows Odysseus the way to Hades. The hero must reach the place where the Pyriphlegethon and the Cocytus, a branch of the Styx, flow into the Acheron, beside a rock. The ancients already recognised in this description the geography of Thesprotia, where a real Acheron and Cocytus flow and where the Acherusian marsh once spread.

Pausanias, in the first book of his Description of Greece, confirms the link: in his view Homer had seen the places of Thesprotia and drawn from them the names of the rivers of the Underworld. He also reports the legend that Theseus and Pirithous travelled to that region to carry off the wife of the king of the Thesprotians, an episode that the better-known versions set instead in the Underworld itself.

Periander and the ghost of Melissa

The most famous historical testimony is in Herodotus. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent messengers to the oracle of the dead by the Acheron to question the spirit of his wife Melissa, whom he himself had killed, about where a deposit entrusted to him by a guest-friend was hidden. Melissa refused to answer: she was cold and naked, because the clothes buried with her had not been burned and were of no use to her.

As proof of her identity, the spirit recalled an intimate and terrible detail that only Periander could understand. The tyrant then had the women of Corinth gathered in the temple of Hera, stripped them of their finest garments and burned them in honour of his wife. Questioned again, Melissa finally revealed where the deposit lay. Whatever its truth, the story shows how dialogue with the dead was imagined.

Discoveries and doubts

In 1958 the Greek archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris began excavating a hill near the village of Mesopotamo, below the monastery of Saint John the Forerunner. He uncovered a Hellenistic building with winding corridors, side rooms and a vaulted underground hall, and identified it with the necromanteion described by the sources. The complex was destroyed by fire, probably during the Roman campaign in Epirus of 167 BC.

In the following years this interpretation was challenged. Several scholars proposed that the building was a fortified farmhouse or a small fortress, and that the metal pieces interpreted as parts of machinery for apparitions were in fact components of catapults. The debate is not closed: it is certain that an oracle of the dead existed in the region, less certain that it is the one excavated.

Today the site, open to visitors, keeps a special atmosphere, heightened by the river landscape. Whether or not it is the sanctuary Herodotus spoke of, Ephyra remains the place where the real geography of Greece and the imaginary geography of the afterlife overlapped most closely, offering the ancients a precise place in which to imagine the border between the living and the dead.