The Synoikia (Greek: συνοικία) was an ancient Greek festival held in Athens commemorating the political unification of Attica. It was also called the Thesean Synoikismos and the Feast of Union, and celebrated Theseus as founder of Athens and the goddess Athena as the city's patron goddess. The festival was celebrated in the month of Hekatombeion on the 16th. A two-day festival, on the 15th and the 16th was held every second year.
The name of the festival comes from the word synoecism (or synoikismos, Greek: συνοικισμός), which means the merging of smaller communities into one larger community. Athenian myth recorded two synoecisms: first the establishment by King Cecrops of the original twelve cities of Attica, and then merger of these twelve cities into a single Athenian state by the mythological King Theseus, with its political centre in Athens. The Synoikia festival celebrated this act of Theseus.
During the festival, ewes and bullocks were sacrificed to Zeus Phratrios (of Brotherhood). The festival was organised and paid for by the phylobasileis, representatives of the original four Athenian tribes, which had otherwise fallen out of use after the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC.
After the Athenian victory over the Persians in the first Greco-Persian War and the subsequent rebuilding and resettling of the city-state, the Synoikia festival became even grander than before.
The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Synoikia”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
Synoikia is an ancient Greek festival held in Athens, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. 1
The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. 1