One night in 373 BCE, the earth beneath the Greek city of Helike groaned and cracked. As homes crumbled and temples collapsed, a tsunami wave surged in from the Gulf of Corinth, swallowing the city whole. Helike, capital of Achaea, vanished from the map. No bodies were ever recovered by archaeologists.
For centuries, the city’s fate was shrouded in myth. It inspired Plato’s account of Atlantis, haunted Roman travelogues, and puzzled archaeologists. But a new study, published in Land by a team of Greek and British researchers, has brought Helike back to life. The city, it turns out, had been destroyed several times; and each time, it was rebuilt in a slightly different place.
“[We show] that the ancient inhabitants of the area always chose to resettle in the area,” write the authors, led by Dora Katsonopoulou, head of the Helike Project. “Adjusting their ways of living to the geomorphology and natural hazards, prevailing each time.”
Their work, spanning more than three decades, offers one of the most detailed case studies to date of human resilience in the face of environmental catastrophe.
A Landscape in Motion
Helike wasn’t just destroyed once. It lived—and died—multiple times, going through a long cycle of rebirth and ruin.
Founded in the Bronze Age over 5,000 years ago, the city was built on a fertile coastal plain between two rivers, with easy access to maritime trade. It was a blessing and a curse as the Gulf of Corinth is the most seismically active part of Europe. Earthquakes, some followed by tsunamis, struck Helike roughly every 300 years.
Each time disaster struck, the city shifted—never far, but always to slightly safer ground. After the catastrophic tsunami of 373 BCE, Helike’s survivors moved westward and rebuilt. Archaeologists found remnants of this reformed city, including textile workshops that hint at a swift return to commercial prosperity.
The researchers modeled these movements using borehole data, sediment analysis, and computer simulations. Digital elevation models (DEMs) helped reconstruct ancient shorelines, revealing how rivers shifted course and land levels rose or fell due to tectonic activity. One earthquake around 2100 BCE triggered a dramatic flood and buried a Bronze Age settlement under lagoon sediments. Later, in Roman times, that same land had risen enough to support a major road.
These shifts weren’t random, as people didn’t flee the region and just reoriented their lives to fit the new landscape.
The Archaeological Footprint of Earthquakes
Across the Helike plain, excavations have uncovered successive layers of destruction and renewal. In some places, the archaeological strata bear the fingerprint of seismic trauma: walls bent at odd angles, pottery shattered in situ, and, in one haunting case, the skeleton of a man crushed beneath a collapsed building.
One trench revealed evidence of a previously unknown earthquake around 700–680 BCE. The fault line sliced straight through the remains of a large building. Its builders had tried to mitigate risk. The structure stood on solid conglomerate, and the use of tall stone footings suggests an early grasp of seismic stability, but it wasn’t enough.
After the 373 BCE disaster, construction styles changed. Builders favored polygonal stone masonry, which was stronger and more quake-resistant. They adapted again after another major quake in the 1st century BCE, shifting the city eastward.
Later still, in the Roman period, a road cut through the landscape, weaving between ruined walls and workshop foundations. That road would still be visible when the travel writer Pausanias passed through in the 2nd century CE.
Helike wasn’t a ghost city. It was a phoenix.
Myth, Memory, and the Sea God
The ancient Greeks were also curious about what destroyed Helike. But they used different explanations. Aristotle, writing not long after the 373 BCE disaster, suggested that earthquakes came from subterranean winds. Others saw the hand of Poseidon, god of the sea and quakes, whose temple stood in Helike and drew worshipers from across the Greek world. For centuries, sailors claimed to see a bronze statue of the god beneath the waves, trident in hand.
According to Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, Helike’s fall came swiftly: “A wave towering even higher washed away and drowned all the inhabitants and their native lands.” Later accounts said only the treetops of Poseidon’s sacred grove remained above water.
But the Helike Project has found no evidence of a city permanently lost to the sea. Instead, they found a landscape in flux: earthquakes tilting the terrain, rivers changing course, lakes forming and drying. It’s possible that the 373 BCE “tsunami” may have included massive inland flooding, triggered by earthquake-dammed rivers—a theory supported by the region’s history of landslide-induced floods.
Lessons from the Past
What makes this study stand out is not just the detail of its geological reconstructions, but the richness of its human story. Helike’s residents responded to disaster not with despair, but with ingenuity. They improvised, adapted, overcame.
Their city was a shifting idea tied to a place—but not tied to any one building or layout. This flexibility, the authors argue, is the essence of resilience. It’s a concept modern planners might take to heart, especially in coastal zones vulnerable to sea-level rise and seismic risk.
In a world increasingly shaken by environmental instability, Helike’s long history offers a quiet but powerful message: resilience doesn’t always mean bouncing back. Sometimes, it means shifting course.
As the researchers write, “The Helike society consistently demonstrated resilience against destruction. It could be said that having confronted for generations with major environmental risks, society learned from past experience and formulated efficacious solutions.”
More than a buried ruin, Helike is now a parable—of loss, endurance, and the long memory of the land.
