Petralona is a semi-mountainous village in the prefecture of Chalkidiki. It is administratively owned by the Municipality of New Propontis of the Region of Central Macedonia/ It is largely taken over by Mount Katsikas. From the top of Katsikas, all Chalkidiki is panoramic. The inhabitants are engaged in agriculture (grain) and livestock farming.
The settlement throughout the Ottoman period was called Kalavrita and was inhabited by Turks, administratively belonging to the tribe of Kalamaria. After 1922, refugees from the Pontus (Dyce) of Asia Minor settled in the village. There they found locals from the Fountain. They first settled in Turks’ landfills and then built their own houses of stone and wood. Later, the State gave them land and began cultivating it systematically. The youngest church of Prophet Elias was completed in 1964. Petralona is a Cultural Association of Pontion, founded in 1979, and there is also the cultural association “The Argonauts”.
About one kilometer from the village, on Mount Katsikas, is the Petralona cave. In the cave there have been found anthropological finds and the oldest traces of habitation of the Greek geographical area. It has been visited since 1979 and excavations continue. In the Anthropological Museum, which has been operating since 1978, we find the mausoleum of the Petralona mausoleum, the oldest samples of fire (at least 1,000,000 years), as well as many stone and bone tools found in Nea Triglia.
