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Last modified: 2019-07-06 by ivan sache
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Flag of Rafina-Pikermi - Image by Tomislav Šipek, 7 May 2019
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The municipality of Rafina-Pikermi (20,266 inhabitants in 2011, 4,184 ha) was established in the 2011 local government reform as the merger of the former municipalities of Pikermi (2,931 inh.) and Rafina (13,091 inh.).
Olivier Touzeau, 20 December 2014
The flag of Rafina-Pikermi (photo) is white with the municipality emblem.
The left part of the emblem represents Pikermi with the silhouette of a
fossil horse (?) and the St. Christopher church.
The right part of the emblem represents Rafina, with the emblematic St.
Nicholas chapel and the port.
Oddly enough, the emblem "reads" Pikermi-Rafina instead of Rafina-Pikermi.
Pikermi is home of a most famous paleontological site.
It was in 1835, a few years after the founding of the Greek state, when
a Bavarian soldier of King Otto's army walks along the banks of the
Great Stream of ​​Pikermi, known today as Valanaris. While searching for
something that he could take back to his homeland, he finds a white
hollow object with small and large crystals sparkling from the inside.
He takes the object in hope to have obtained not just a souvenir but
also the option to become rich.
"It's not diamonds," famous professor for paleontology, Johann Andreas
Wagner, tells the soldier in Munich after after he had returned home.
However, the sparkling crystals were valuable from a different point of
view: they were formed inside cavities of animals extincted thousand of
years ago.
Located 19 km east of Athens, the paleontological site of Pikermi
features more than forty mammal species from the late Miocene (8 million
years ago) and fossils of animals that do not exist in Greece anymore.
Only in Africa. What followed the discovery were excavations and discoveries but also
plundering.
New species are identified and the name of Pikermi is depicted in
scientific texts throughout the world, while international researches
describe it as the "Acropolis of Palaeontology".
"The location is particularly rich in fossils. We have more than 50
different species of animals that would remind us of an African
landscape and even richer because we have animal species that are not
present in Africa today," Georgios Theodorou, professor at
Paleontology, Geology and Geoenvironment Department of Athens University
told news agency AMNA that visited the site.
Noting that the most recent research began at PV1-Pikermi Valley 1 in
2009, Theodorou noted that this year’s excavation began on April 24th
and is expected to end at the end of June.
"Among these animals are animals with trunk, giraffes, rhinoceroses,
horses, hyenas, felidae, giant turtles (found earlier), small turtles,
birds, ostriches and monkeys such as the Mesopithecus of Penteli, a very
rare fossil, we were lucky to find three samples this year," Theodorou
said.
Recalling that the area of today's Aegean Sea was once dry, he said that
"from Greece to Asia Minor [Turkey] there was a continent with a rich
fauna including more than 50 species of animals that lived in Aigiida
[the continent] almost 57 million years after the disappearance of the
Dinosaurs."
That is 7,200,000 years ago, as recent studies have shown, Theodorou
said adding they will try also to study the area of Agioi Anargyroi, at
the Queen's Tower {Pyrgos Vassilissis] in West Attica, where one fossil
of the Grecopithecus was found long ago. The Grecopithecus finding was
25,000 years away from the Pikermi findings.
Excavation and research cannot proceed with the desired pace due to lack
of funding. Only 7,000 euros gross are being made available pro year.
[Keep Talking Greece, 10 June 2018]
Signaled in 1839 by Andreas Wagner, the Pikermi site was first excavated
in 1855 by the French paleontologist Albert Gaudry (1827-1908),
commissioned by the French Academy of Sciences; a second campaign made
in 1860 allowed Gaudry to complete his collections and to initiate the
publication of Animaux fossiles et géologie de l'Attique (1862-1867;
summarized in 1866 in Résumé des recherches sur les animaux fossiles de
Pikermi. Bulletin de la Société géologique de France, 2, 509-516).
Gaudry was elected President of the French Society of Geology in 1863.
Appointed in 1872 Professor of Paleontology at the National Museum of
Natural History, he was elected in 1882 at the Academy of Sciences
and appointed by his peers President of the 8th International Congress
of Geology, held in Paris in 1900.
[J. Gaudant. 2008. Albert Gaudry (1827-1908), paléontologue darwinien ?
Travaux du Comité français d'histoire de la géologie, 3e série, 22, 105-111; A. Gaudry. 1866. Considérations générales sur les animaux fossiles de Pikermi. Savy, Paris; A. Thévenin. 1908. Albert Gaudry (1827-1908).
The Albert Gaudry collection (list), kept in the National Museum of Natural
History, includes several types of fossils excavated in Pikermi:
- Mastodon pentelici Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Hyaena chaeritis Gaudry, 1861
- Palaeoryx parvidens Gaudry, 1861
- Camelopardalis duvernoyi Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Palaeotragus rouenii Gaudry, 1861
- Tragocerus valenciennesi Gaudry, 1865
- Hyaenictis graeca Gaudry, 1861
- Promephitis lartetii Gaudry, 1862
- Viverra orbigny Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Mustela pentelici Gaudry, 1861
- Leptodon graecus Gaudry, 1862
- Macrotherium pentelicum Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Testudo marmorum Gaudry, 1862
- Helladotherium duvernoyi Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Bohlinia attica Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Chaerolophodon pentelici Gaudry & Lartet, 1856
- Pliocervus pentelici Gaudry, 1866.
Tomislav Šipek & Ivan Sache, 29 May 2019
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Flag of Rafina - Image by Olivier Touzeau, 20 December 2014
During the ancient times, Rafina was one of the 100 demes of Athens which was defined by Kleisthenes. The municipality was called Arafin, by the name of its first ruler, Arafinas, who was one of the 100 heroes of Attica.
After the defeat of the Greek army in the Minor Asia (1922), many refugees
arrived in Greece. Some of them arrived by ships owned by Filippos
Kabounides, a shipowner from Triglia (Tirilye); a year later (29 August
1923), Kabounides' ships brought to Rafina refugees who had lived in
Tenedos for one year. Six years later (1929), Rafina became a community.
During the 1950s Pantovasilissa's church was built in remembrance of the
Byzantine church in Triglia which hold the same name.
Rafina became a municipality in 1994. Rafina is the second busiest port of Athens after Piraeus, mostly serving Euboea and the northern Cyclades (Andros, Tinos and Mykonos).
The flag of Rafina (photo; Kokkonis website) was yellow
with a wide blue border and the municipal emblem in the center. The emblem features Agios Nikolaos chapel in Rafina port.
Olivier Touzeau, 20 December 2014
