Paleopoli, the city of the Great Gods

Around 700 BC Greek settlers, most likely from Lesbos and the coast of Asia Minor, founded a city here on the slope between Mount Saos and the sea. They found an older population of Thracians already living on the island and worshipping their own gods, and the two came together. The city grew rich, built a wall of great stone blocks up the hillside, parts of which still stand, and kept a fleet and colonies on the mainland opposite.

In a ravine just west of the city, between two streams, lay the sanctuary. Its gods were never named in full in public: a Great Mother of the mountains, a pair of underworld gods, a young male god and the twin Kabeiroi, protectors of sailors. People came to be initiated into their Mysteries, in rites held at night, and initiation was open to almost anyone, men and women, Greeks and foreigners, free and slave. The island's old Thracian language survived in the rituals for centuries.

The sanctuary grew famous, and kings competed to adorn it. Philip II of Macedon was initiated here as a young man, and according to Plutarch it was here that he first met Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great. Alexander's successors built some of its finest buildings, among them the great round Arsinoeion, given by Queen Arsinoe II, and in 168 BC the last king of Macedon, Perseus, fled here after his defeat by Rome. The cult lasted into the late Roman empire, and faded away with the rise of Christianity.

Earthquakes and the centuries brought the buildings down. In the Middle Ages the Gattilusi, the Genoese lords of Lesbos who held Samothraki in the 15th century, used the ancient stones to build towers on the hill above the old harbour, and those towers still stand. Then in 1863 a French consul, Charles Champoiseau, dug in the ruins and found the marble Winged Victory, the goddess Nike alighting on the prow of a ship. She was taken to Paris, where she stands at the top of a staircase in the Louvre.

Archaeologists have been working here ever since, and the site you walk through today owes much to the American excavations that began in the 1930s. It is a quiet, green place: columns standing among plane trees, the outline of the theatre, the niche where the Victory stood looking down on the sanctuary, and the mountain rising behind. Come early or late, when the light is low and you may have it to yourself.