Lion of Kea

The Lion of Kea lies on a hillside a short walk outside Ioulida, the inland capital of Kea, the Cycladic island closest to the Attic mainland. It was cut from the rock where it still rests, most likely around 600 BC, and runs roughly nine metres from nose to tail and three metres at the shoulder. Who carved it, and why, nobody knows.

What Is Known About It

The sculpture belongs to the Archaic period, and most sources place it shortly before 600 BC, when the island was known as Keos. It was worked in place from an outcrop of local stone, described in different accounts as schist or limestone, so the animal appears to be lying in the hillside rather than standing on it. Published measurements vary between about eight and nine metres in length. Weathering has rounded the surface over some 2,600 years in the open, but the mane, the muzzle and the line of the flank still read clearly.

The Legend of the Nymphs

Kea was once called Hydroussa, the water island, and legend placed water nymphs at its springs. Jealous gods sent a lion that drove the nymphs away, and the island dried out. Aristaeus, son of Apollo, built an altar to Zeus; rain returned, and the springs with it. The sculpture above Ioulida is usually explained as a monument to that story. Other readings are that it marked a grave, lions being a standard funerary guardian in Archaic Greece, or that it stood over a water source. None of them is proven.

Kea had four ancient cities: Ioulis, Karthaia, Poiessa and Koressia. The lion lies just outside the first of them, on the edge of what was inhabited ground, which is one reason the grave-marker and boundary-marker readings keep coming back.

The Archaic Smile

The lion's mouth curves upward into something close to a grin, which is why it is so often linked to the Archaic smile seen on the kouroi and korai of the sixth century BC. Sculptors of that period used the expression as a convention, probably to signal that the figure was alive. There is a less romantic reading too: the curve may be what erosion has left of a mouth originally carved rather differently.

Lions in Greek Art

Lions were not imaginary animals to the Greeks. Herodotus records them attacking the baggage camels of Xerxes' army in Macedonia in 480 BC, and the species survived in the southern Balkans into antiquity. In art the lion stood for strength and rank. The first labour of Herakles was the lion of Nemea, whose hide he afterwards wore; the Lion Gate at Mycenae set two of them above the citadel entrance; and on Delos, Naxian sculptors lined the sacred way with marble lions around 600 BC, the same generation that produced the one on Kea.

Getting There

The site is about ten minutes on foot from Ioulida along an old stone path that passes the Kounderis spring, downhill on the way out and uphill coming back. The lion faces the valley, and the walk gives the best view of Ioulida stacked up its slope. The town itself is stepped and largely closed to cars, and its archaeological museum holds material from Ayia Irini, the Bronze Age settlement near Vourkari on the north coast, including the terracotta female figures found there. Korissia, the island's port, is on the northwest coast. Kea is roughly an hour by ferry from Lavrio, which makes it a workable first or last stop on an Aegean itinerary, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Greece coast.