The late-Greek village Promahon-Topolnitsa is located on both side of the Bulgarian-Greek border, 2 km south of the Topolnitsa village (Bulgaria) and 3,5 km northwest of Promahon village (Greece). It’s situated on the foot of the eastern slopes of Belasitsa. The results of the archaeological research have shown several construction stages, combined into 4 phases.

At first, a big basement temple, 8 meters dug into the ground, was built (around 5320-5300 B.C.) It used to have 2 floors, as the top floor was a ground floor and its walls were decorated with bull skulls, painted in red. This construction seems to be of extreme importance because it’s the only existing basement Neolithic temple in Europe. Eventually, the infrastructure of the village was built around it, consisting of dug-out living spaces.

The 2nd stage in the life development of the village was quite long ( 5300-5070 B.C.). From an architectural point of view, the village consisted of a center (at the site of the big temple) while there were two-storey dwelling places tightly built to each other around it. Around 5700 B.C. the village was completely burnt down. After the fire, the ground was levelled and this and typical buildings with stakes were constructed. The cultural center has already been moved to the east. There was a big embossed composition on the western wall of the researched temple and it consisted of massive semi-embossed idols. During this stage, the village expanded quickly and covered the largest part of the plateau. This was also the time when a massive protection palisade was built. The ground buildings from this period had a rectangular shape. The 3rd stage dated back to 5070-4750 B.C. At the end of this stage the settlement was once again destroyed by a fire. The last forth phase of the village history (3750- 4650 B.C) already refers to the beginning of the early Eneolithic period.

The most typical phenomenon for the first phase is the bitumen-coated ceramics. The analysis shows that the bitumen was not used as a decoration material, but only as glue to stick decoration elements of birch bark to the utensils. During the later phases, the decoration of the utensils consisted of dark-brown drawings in Akropotamo style. Some utensils used to have anthropomorphic shapes in order to represent the human body. The ceramics of the village has a very good quality-thin-walled, perfectly- burnt with a polished surface. It was completely different from the thick-walled ceramics from the late-Neolithic period in the northern parts of the Balkan peninsula. The village used to keep close contacts with Thessalia.

The graphitic decoration of utensils with 0.5- 2sm-wide lines appeared for the first time during the 3rd phase. As for the 4th phase we could see a drastic change in the whole material culture of the village which was due to the population changes. The villages were totally abandoned around 4650 B.C. and as a result of the sharp heating of the climate all villages in the south parts of the peninsula disappeared.