Eretria's most important place of worship lay outside its city walls, roughly ten kilometers east, near present-day Amarynthos. Its annual festival, the Artemisia, drew crowds from across Euboea. Yet for generation after generation, archaeologists searched the plain and came up empty. Beginning in the early 2000s, the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece, working with the local Ephorate of Antiquities, brought modern tools to the hunt, surveying the ground with geophysical equipment that reads what lies beneath the surface. The trail led to the hill of Paleoekklisies. In 2017, the digging turned up inscriptions that mentioned Artemis Amarysia by name, and the century-old mystery closed. Excavations have since revealed a temple, porticoes, and votive monuments spanning from the Bronze Age to Roman imperial times, including an extraordinary deposit of sixth-century BC offerings found inside the temple itself.

Long before the sanctuary, people lived here. The flat coastal ground around Amarynthos has held a settlement since the Late Neolithic, around 3000 BC, when it was one of the most significant Helladic communities and a working port on the South Euboean Gulf. Its people traded with the Cycladic islands, worked copper, fished, and farmed, and in time produced fine pottery. The name Amarynthos itself surfaces in clay tablets written in the Linear B script of the Mycenaean age, which is why some scholars have argued that the Eretria of Mycenaean legend actually stood here rather than at the later classical site. In Greek myth, Amarynthos was a man of Eretria who chased the goddess Artemis out of love, and gave the town his name.

Amarynthos wears its long history quietly. The ancient sanctuary gave way, over the centuries, to other forms of devotion. Byzantine churches dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, the Transfiguration, and the Life-Giving Spring still stand in and around the town, and to the northeast the monastery of Agios Nikolaos preserves wall paintings from the twelfth century. A Macedonian tomb from the fourth century BC was excavated just outside town in 1897. Power passed through here in waves, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman, before the town joined the modern Greek state around 1830. In the twentieth century, refugees from Asia Minor settled here after the population exchange of the 1920s, and during the Second World War German troops burned part of the town. Each layer left its mark on a place that has been continuously inhabited for some five thousand years.

Today Amarynthos is a relaxed coastal town on the South Euboean Gulf, its waterfront lined with tavernas and its flat farmland running back from the beach toward the mountains. The Euboean Olympus rises ten kilometers to the north, watching over the plain where the goddess was once worshipped. Visitors come for the beach and the easy pace, often without realizing that the unremarkable hill nearby held, for a century, one of Greek archaeology's most wanted prizes. The excavations continue, and most years bring something new out of the ground, so that the town's deep past keeps surfacing into its quiet present.