Kerameikos was Athens' potters' quarter long before it became its city of the dead. The name comes from the clay workshops that once lined this marshy stretch of ground northwest of the ancient city, where the Eridanos river kept the soil wet and pliable. It was that same swampy terrain, too waterlogged for housing, that made it suitable for burials, and by the sixth century BC, under the tyrant Peisistratos, Kerameikos had become the official cemetery of Athens.

The site is vast, more than 120,000 square metres, much of it still unexcavated. Somewhere beneath the soil lies the tomb of Pericles. It was here, along the Street of Tombs, that he likely delivered his famous funeral oration for soldiers lost in the Peloponnesian War.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tour traces the site's layers from Bronze Age cremation pits to marble cavalry monuments, explaining the ancient rituals of death and burial, the purpose of the Dipylon Gate, and the road that once carried Athenians to the Eleusinian Mysteries at Eleusis.