Habbo G. Lolling at Melitaia: The Antiquities of an Ancient City through the Lens of Two 1882 Notebooks

The Greek–Finnish collaborative field-project, the Melitaia Archaeological Programme, began in 2022 to examine the ancient Thessalian city of Melitaia. The programme is the first endeavour to systematically document the entirety of the ancient site, but does not represent the first endeavour to outline its antiquities. Already in 1882, the German scholar and epigraphist Habbo Gerhard Lolling visited the location and made a remarkably detailed plan of its visible architectural remains. Lolling’s account was never published and remained forgotten among his notebooks after his untimely death in 1894. In this article, the site of ancient Melitaia is presented through a combination of Lolling’s notes and a recent LiDAR survey, providing a rare glimpse of the state of the archaeological site both in the present and in the years immediately after the incorporation of Thessaly into the Kingdom of Greece.