Temple of Aphaia, Aegina
Ναός της Αφαίας
Interesting facts
- According to Pausanias, the Aeginetans identified Aphaia with the Cretan goddess Britomartis, who in myth leapt into fishing nets to escape King Minos and was made divine by Artemis.
- Pausanias also records that the poet Pindar composed an ode for Aphaia at the request of the people of Aegina.
- Cuttings in the stone suggest the east pediment's first sculpture group was removed and replaced before that end of the temple was even finished.
- The east pediment featured the Aeginetan hero Telamon fighting beside Heracles, while the west pediment gave a prominent place to his son Ajax at Troy.
- All but three of the temple's outer columns were carved as single monolithic shafts rather than stacked drums.
- Each central roof ornament was flanked by a pair of marble kore statues, an arrangement scholars describe as unusual.
- The temple's metopes have never been found; if they were made of wood, that would explain why nothing of them survives.
- The Bronze Age shrine on the hilltop has yielded many tiny clay chariots, thrones and miniature vessels, yet no settlement or burials nearby.
- An earlier phase of the sanctuary had a column about 14 metres tall crowned by a sphinx.
- Proposed construction dates for the surviving temple range from 510 to 470 BC, with around 500 BC most widely favoured.
Why it is worth it
On a hilltop in the east of Aegina, an island in the Saronic Gulf, the Doric columns of the Temple of Aphaia still stand around their cella, though the roof is long gone. Built around 500 BC, the temple is remarkable for an unusual plan and above all for its pediment sculptures, which capture the moment when Greek art was turning from the Archaic to the Early Classical style.
Aphaia was a goddess worshipped only here. Figurines found on the hilltop suggest that a cult of a female deity existed as early as the Late Bronze Age, centuries before any temple. A first stone temple was built before 570 BC and burned around 510 BC; its remains were buried in the fill of a new, larger terrace and survived with traces of their original paint. The new temple was a Doric peripteral building of six by twelve columns on a platform about 15.5 by 30.5 metres; inside the cella, two rows of five columns carried an upper tier of columns up to the roof, an unusual arrangement. The roof corners bore marble sphinxes, and the tiles themselves were of marble.
The pediments showed the heroes of Aegina fighting at Troy in two wars — one led by Heracles, the other by Agamemnon — with Athena at the centre of each. Carved fully in the round, even on their hidden backs, the figures are a key source for the study of painted Greek sculpture. In 1811 the young English architect Charles Robert Cockerell and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg removed the fallen pediment figures, which were sold the next year to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria; restored by Bertel Thorvaldsen, they are now in the Glyptothek in Munich, and they helped shape Munich's neoclassical architecture. The temple, long called the Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, was a favourite subject of Romantic painters, among them J. M. W. Turner. German archaeologists excavated the sanctuary from the early twentieth century, and the reassembled entablature of the older temple can be seen in the site museum.
Getting there
The temple stands on a hill about 160 metres high in the northeast of Aegina, about 13 km by road east of Aegina town, the island's main port, near the village of Agia Marina. Ferries and hydrofoils cross to Aegina from Piraeus in about forty minutes to an hour. Athens International Airport (ATH) is about 42 km away in a straight line, on the mainland across the Saronic Gulf.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Temple of Aphaia is an Ancient Greek temple located within a sanctuary complex dedicated to the goddess Aphaia on the island of Aegina, which lies in the Saronic Gulf. Formerly known as the Temple of Jupiter Panhellenius, the Doric temple is now recognized as having been dedicated to the mother-goddess Aphaia. It was a favourite of Neoclassical and Romantic artists such as J. M. W. Turner. It stands on a c. 160 m peak on the eastern side of the island approximately 13 km east by road from the main port.
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