Remnants of the ancient ship sheds «Neosoikoi»

At the junction of Moutsopoulou Coast and Syraggiou Street in Pasalimani, in the basement of an apartment building, remnants of the ancient ship sheds of Zea, which constituted the oldest public buildings of Piraeus, are preserved. In Zea the ship sheds were divided east and west. In pairs they formed an elongated shed that was closed at the back with a continuous wall, separated by colonnades and covered with a double-pitched roof. Between them there was a platform carved into the rock or built of stone, with a wooden floor and a groove for the ship’s keel for lifting and lowering purposes. In each ship shed, only a single trireme or two smaller ships were hoisted lengthwise in the same space on the sloping “slipway”. In Zea the slipway consists of two parallel low walls on which a wooden floor was fixed, which was smeared with fat along the axis and on which slid the back of the keel, framed by wooden crossbars. No trace remains of the ship sheds of the western side of the port of Zea, while a small part of the eastern side is preserved in the above-mentioned underground area of the apartment building.