Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae

On a bare limestone shoulder of Mount Kotilion, more than 1,100 metres up in the wild hills where ancient Arcadia met Messenia, stands one of the best-preserved temples of classical Greece. Its name, Bassai, means roughly a little vale among the rocks, and the setting is exactly that: grey stone, oak scrub and a long view over ridges towards the sea. The remoteness that makes the place so striking is also what saved it. No later town grew around it and no church was built inside it, so the colonnade of grey local limestone still stands almost whole.

The temple was raised by the people of nearby Phigalia in the second half of the 5th century BC and dedicated to Apollo Epikourios, Apollo the Helper. The traveller Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, tied the title to the god's help against a plague during the Peloponnesian War and named the architect as Iktinos, the designer of the Parthenon. Modern scholars treat that attribution with caution, but they agree the building is one of the most inventive of its age. Hemmed in by the slope, it faces north rather than east, with a side door that may have let morning light fall on the cult image.

Bassae is famous among architects because it brings together all three classical orders. Doric columns ring the outside, Ionic half-columns line the interior, and a single column at the back of the inner hall carried the earliest Corinthian capital yet known. Above the interior ran a continuous marble frieze of Greeks fighting Amazons and Lapiths fighting Centaurs, an unusual choice for the inside of a temple. The frieze slabs were taken away in 1812 and have been in the British Museum since 1815.

Western travellers rediscovered the temple in the 1760s, and systematic Greek excavations followed from 1902. In 1986 it became the first site in Greece to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, ahead of the Acropolis by a year.

Getting there

The temple lies high in the mountains of the western Peloponnese, close to the villages of Skliros and Figalia, and the nearest town of any size is Andritsaina, on the road that climbs up from the north. The closest larger city is Kalamata, about 47 km away in a straight line but considerably further by mountain road. Kalamata Airport (KLX) is the nearest airport, about 42 km away as the crow flies; there is no rail service, and the site is reached by car along winding upland roads.