Berezan
The first Greek colony in the N Black Sea, it is on an island in the Dnieper-S. Bug estuary. The earliest Greek pottery dates from ca. mid 7th c. B.C.
The city's most prosperous period dates from the 6th-5th c. B.C. and is represented by traces of houses, 6th c. pottery, and black-glazed bowls of the 6th-5th c. from Rhodes and Attica; also terracottas (seated goddesses or grotesques), and 5th c. coins from Olbia. There is also a necropolis. Recent excavations suggest that the site existed until the 4th c. B.C. and was inhabited again in the early centuries A.D. when various finds indicate that a sanctuary of Achilles may have existed here. The Hermitage and Odessa Museums contain material from this site.
BIBLIOGRAPHYE. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (1913) 451-53; E. Belin de Ballu, L'Histoire des Colonies grecques du Littoral nord de la Mer Noire (1965) 41-43; V. V. Lapin, Grecheskaia kolonizatsiia Severnogo Prichernomor'ia (1966); I. B. Brašinskij, “Recherches soviétiques sur les monuments antiques des régions de la Mer Noire,” Eirene 7 (1968) 86-87; K. S. Gorbunova, Drevnie Greki na ostrove Berezan' (1969).
M. L. BERNHARD & Z. SZTETYŁŁO