On Sunday 23 August at 9pm, the little stone village of Pacheia Rachi opens its cultural centre for one of those evenings that make island summers worth extending: a film, an archaeology talk, and live music, all in one sitting. The event - billed as 'An August Evening in Pacheia Rachi' - is organised by the village cultural association, which is fittingly named after the mountain that towers behind it, together with the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece (ESAG) and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Piraeus and Islands. The programme runs in three acts: a screening of a documentary on Aegina's ancient olive grove, a presentation of the excavation on Ellanion Oros by archaeologist Tobias Krapf on behalf of the Greek-Swiss team, and a 'nychtodia' - a night serenade - by the Estudiantina of Aegina.
The mountain in question is the one you see from everywhere on the island: Ellanion Oros, also simply called Oros, the highest point of Aegina at just over 530 metres. In antiquity its summit belonged to Zeus Hellanios, and the myth attached to it is one of the grandest any Greek mountain carries. When a terrible drought gripped all of Greece, it was Aiakos, Aegina's own king and the grandfather of Achilles, who climbed this peak to pray for rain on behalf of every Greek - and Zeus answered. For centuries afterwards, clouds gathering on the summit meant rain was coming, a weather sign Aeginetan farmers trust to this day. The travel writer Pausanias described the sanctuary here almost two thousand years ago; the massive ancient terraces on the northern slope have never stopped being visible.
Since 2021 the Ephorate and the Swiss School have been digging into what actually happened up there, and the results have been remarkable. On the summit the team uncovered a small building, roughly four and a half by three metres, packed with about thirty pots - cooking pots, storage jars, drinking cups - dating to the very years the Mycenaean palaces were collapsing in the twelfth century BC: evidence that when the Bronze Age world fell apart, people climbed the mountain and sheltered on its peak. Above those layers lay the sanctuary itself: roof tiles from a temple, and a black stratum of sacrificial ash holding thousands of fragments of burnt animal bone, with pottery running from the Geometric period straight through to Roman times - a thousand years of pilgrimage on one hilltop. And the story is still growing: this July the team completed a five-week intensive survey of the slopes around the mountain, walking 444 survey units and recording more than twenty thousand pottery sherds. The Pacheia Rachi talk is the first public account of the season since the trenches closed - island archaeology news at its freshest, delivered a few hundred metres below the mountain it concerns.
One honest note for non-Greek speakers: the invitation has been circulated in both Greek and English, and the speaker belongs to an international team, but the language of the evening has not been announced. We have asked and will update this article when we hear back. Even if the talk runs in Greek, the evening carries itself - the film about the island's centuries-old olive grove is a visual story, excavation photographs speak every language, and the estudiantina needs no translation at all. Aegina's English-speaking residents turn up to village evenings like this one all the time; it is the easiest way there is to stop being a visitor for a few hours.
Practicalities: Pacheia Rachi is a beautifully restored stone hamlet on the road toward the mountain, about six kilometres and fifteen minutes by car or taxi from Aegina town - come a little early and walk its lanes while there is still light, because the village itself is worth the trip. The evening starts at 21:00 and it is held in the open August air of the hills, so a light extra layer is not a bad idea. And if the lecture leaves you wanting more of the island's ancient stones, the archaeologists themselves see Ellanion Oros as one corner of a future archaeological trail that runs to the island's two other great sanctuaries - the temple at Kolona by the harbour and the Temple of Aphaia above Agia Marina. On this island, the past is never more than a short drive uphill.