Qualla: Kepoi

Kepoi: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Gustav Droysen (6 July 1808 – 19 June 1884), Public domain. The greatest orator Athens ever produced had a grandfather living in exile on the edge of the Scythian world, and the town he lived in was called, quite literally, "the Gardens." That is what Kepoi means in Greek. This modest colony sat on the Taman Peninsula just three kilometers east of the great city of Phanagoria, founded by settlers from Miletus in the sixth century BCE. It never rivaled its neighbors in size or fame, but through one banished Athenian it brushed against the story of Demosthenes himself, tying a small Black Sea farming town to the most celebrated voice in classical Greece.

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Image: Johann Gustav Droysen (6 July 1808 – 19 June 1884) | Public domain

Kepoi: A Gift for a Disgraced Athenian

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikSed, CC BY 4.0. The story comes to us, unkindly, from Aeschines, the great rival of Demosthenes, who dredged up the orator's family history to smear him in court. Demosthenes' grandfather, a man named Gylon, had been banished from Athens near the end of the Peloponnesian War, accused of betrayin...

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Image: MikSed | CC BY 4.0

Kepoi: Under the Kings of the Strait

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Retired electrician, CC0. Whatever its ties to famous men, Kepoi was above all a working Greek town on a busy trading coast. Through the Hellenistic centuries it fell under the control of the Bosporan Kingdom, the Greco-Scythian realm that dominated both shores of the strait and grew wealthy on grain, fis...

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Image: Retired electrician | CC0

Kepoi: The Goddess in the Ground

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johann Gustav Droysen (6 July 1808 – 19 June 1884), Public domain. For centuries Kepoi lay forgotten, until Soviet archaeologists began digging in 1957 and the earth gave up its treasures. Among the finds was a marble statue of a Greek goddess so lovely it earned a name of its own, the Aphrodite of Taman. Through the 1960s and 1970s excavators e...

Read more: Kepoi on Qualla

Image: Johann Gustav Droysen (6 July 1808 – 19 June 1884) | Public domain