Case file · Anomaly hotspot
Pavlopetri, the oldest drowned town
Off the Laconian coast in Vatika Bay lies Pavlopetri, a town about 5,000 years old with streets, buildings and tombs, often called the oldest submerged town known.
1967 CE · 36.52, 22.99 · status: official
The account
Geologist Fokion Negris noted walls there in 1904; oceanographer Nicholas Flemming rediscovered the site in 1967 and a Cambridge team mapped it in 1968. Fieldwork from 2009 made it the first submerged town surveyed digitally in three dimensions, identifying at least 15 buildings and nearly forty cist graves. It sank gradually through earthquakes and rising sea. Anchors and souvenir hunters now threaten it.
The sceptical view
A documented Bronze Age site, sometimes wrongly offered as 'Atlantis' online.
Connections in the atlas
- Atlit Yam, a drowned Neolithic village
- Baiae, the drowned resort of Rome
- Thonis-Heracleion found under Abu Qir Bay
- Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules