Cape Sounion

Cape Sounion is the rocky promontory at the very southern tip of the Attica peninsula, about 69.5 kilometres southeast of Athens along the coast road known as the Athens Riviera, and some eight kilometres south of the port town of Lavrio. Its skyline is dominated by the Temple of Poseidon, built between 444 and 440 BC under the leadership of Pericles on the site of an earlier, Archaic-era temple destroyed by the Persians around 480 BC. Of the temple's original 34 marble columns, each roughly 6.1 metres tall, fifteen still stand today.

The Temple of Poseidon

The temple stands almost 60 metres above the water, which is why its columns are picked out against the sky from far offshore. It is a Doric building of the standard hexastyle type, six columns across the front, with a six-by-thirteen arrangement in total rather than the six-by-twelve plan first laid out. The marble came from the Agrileza quarries a short distance inland, a coarse-grained local stone rather than the finer marble shipped in for the Acropolis. Each shaft measures roughly a metre across at the base and narrows to 79 centimetres at the top. The temple did not stand alone: it sat inside a walled precinct entered through a propylaea, a modest gateway divided by two Doric columns and approached by steps and a ramp, with two stoas framing the north-western corner of the enclosure.

A second sanctuary sat about 300 metres to the north-east, dedicated to Athena Sounias and built around 470 BC. Its plan was unorthodox, with colonnades along only the southern and eastern sides instead of wrapping the whole building. It did not survive antiquity: in the first century AD it was dismantled and its columns carted off to be reused in the Agora at Athens, leaving little more than foundations today.

Myth, Homer and the Defence of Attica

The cape's connection to the sea runs through both myth and hard strategy. In legend, this is where King Aegeus is said to have thrown himself into the water after mistakenly believing his son Theseus had died fighting the Minotaur on Crete — the traditional origin of the name "Aegean Sea." In more concrete terms, Athens fortified Sounion in 413 BC during the Peloponnesian War to protect the grain ships supplying the city, making it one of the key defensive points of ancient Attica. Homer's Odyssey mentions the headland even earlier, recounting the death of King Menelaus's helmsman as his fleet rounded "holy Sounion."

The Homeric passage names that helmsman as Phrontis, struck down by Apollo as the fleet rounded the cape on the way home from Troy, with Menelaus putting in to shore to bury him. Herodotus records that by the sixth century BC the Athenians were holding a festival at Sounion every four years, and after the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis they dedicated a captured Persian warship here as a trophy to Poseidon.

The fortification of 413 BC came in the nineteenth year of the Peloponnesian War, when Spartan raiding out of Decelea had cut the overland routes and Athens depended entirely on seaborne grain. The circuit wall enclosed a little more than half a mile of the headland, and in its north-western corner the Athenians cut shipsheds able to hold two warships, turning the sanctuary into a working naval station; Macedonian garrisons later strengthened and extended the defences. Sounion also watched over the silver mines of the Lavreotiki just inland, whose output had paid for the fleet that fought at Salamis.

What the Excavations Found

Systematic digging began in 1897 under Valerios Stais for the Athens Archaeological Society and continued until 1915, uncovering the temple, the fortification circuit and traces of the settlement, along with inscriptions confirming the dedications to Poseidon and Athena. Large votive pits held offerings spanning the late eighth to the early fifth century BC — pottery, terracotta figures, seals and metalwork — and the earliest material on the site dates to around 700 BC.

The most famous find came in 1906: the Sounion Kouros, a colossal statue of a naked youth carved from Naxian marble around 600 BC and restored to an original height of 3.05 metres. It had been smashed when the Persians sacked the sanctuary and buried by the Athenians in a pit opposite the temple, which is precisely why so much of it survived. It now stands in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Rather later, in 1810, Lord Byron cut his own name into the marble of one of the columns; he returned to the site in verse, calling it "Sunium's marbled steep."

The Headland Beyond the Ruins

Since 1974 the surrounding countryside has been protected as Sounio National Park, with a core zone of 750 hectares and a wider area of roughly 2,750 hectares running inland from Lavrio through Legrena to the cape. It is Aleppo pine, low scrub and thyme over ground riddled with ancient mine workings, and the district is a well-known mineralogical site with more than 260 minerals recorded. The climate is hot semi-arid, and the sanctuary looks out to the south-west, which is the practical reason the sunset here has been the standard excuse to make the trip.

Visiting Sounion by Land and Sea

The archaeological site is normally open through the middle of the day and until sunset, with a standard summer ticket at €20 and a reduced winter rate; it closes on a handful of national holidays and admits visitors free on several designated culture days. By road it is a straightforward run down the coast from Athens, and buses serve the cape. Arriving from the water is the older experience, since every ship working the approaches to Athens had to round this headland.

For anyone sailing the Attica coast, the temple's columns are visible from far out at sea, and calm anchorages on the cape's western side make it an easy call for boats exploring the region — Cape Sounion is a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Athens.