Epidaurus Theater

The theatre of Epidaurus stands on the west slope of Mount Kynortion in the Argolid, in the north-eastern Peloponnese, a few kilometres from the modern village of Lygourio. It was built in the late fourth century BC as part of the Sanctuary of Asklepios, the largest healing centre of the ancient Greek world, and it is one of the best-preserved theatres to survive from antiquity. Theatre and sanctuary were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988.

The sanctuary and its theatre

Pausanias credited the design to Polykleitos the Younger and singled the building out for its proportions. It sits at the south-eastern edge of a complex dedicated to Asklepios, god of medicine, which also held the god's temple, the circular tholos, a stadium, and the abaton — the long portico where patients slept in the hope of a healing dream. Drama here was understood as part of the treatment rather than a distraction from it: watching a performance was thought to work on the body as well as the mind. Patients came from across the Greek world, and the sanctuary held its own festival, the Asklepieia, every four years, with athletic and dramatic contests. Inscribed tablets recording cures were set up on the site, and over the centuries the sanctuary's practice shifted from dream-cures towards observation and treatment, a change that can be followed in its buildings and its inscriptions.

How it is built

The auditorium has 55 rows of seats in all: 34 below the walkway that divides it and 21 above, the upper tier added in the middle of the second century BC. Full, the theatre held somewhere between 13,000 and 14,000 people. At its foot is a circular orchestra 20 metres across with the base of an altar at its centre. Behind that stood the skene, a two-storey stage building with a colonnaded proscenium, side rooms for the performers and ramps up to a roof-level acting area; it was built in two phases, at the end of the fourth century BC and again in the mid-second, and only its foundations remain today. Two vaulted gateways, the parodoi, gave the audience access at either side of the orchestra; both have been reconstructed. The front row and the row at the dividing walkway were cut as backed thrones for priests and officials.

The acoustics

Guides demonstrate the theatre's acoustics by dropping a coin or tearing a sheet of paper in the orchestra; it is audible from the back row, with no amplification of any kind. Acoustic researchers have traced the effect to the seating itself. The corrugated rows of limestone act as a filter, damping the low-frequency murmur of wind and crowd while reflecting the higher frequencies that carry a speaking voice, so a spectator in the last row hears close to what one in the front row hears. The hillside setting and the careful geometry of the bowl do the rest.

Rediscovery

The theatre spent centuries buried under earth washed down the hillside, which is the main reason so much of it survived. Panagis Kavvadias began excavating the sanctuary for the Greek Archaeological Society in 1881 and uncovered the auditorium largely intact; restoration of the seating and the parodoi followed in the twentieth century. The site now draws large numbers of Greek and foreign visitors, particularly on performance nights.

Performances today

The theatre was brought back into use in 1938, when Dimitris Rontiris staged Sophocles' Electra there. Performances resumed after the war in 1954 and became an annual fixture from 1955 as the Epidaurus Festival, now programmed alongside the Athens Festival. The summer season runs from around June to September, mostly on Friday and Saturday nights, and stays close to ancient tragedy and comedy, with opera and concerts among them. Maria Callas sang Norma at Epidaurus in 1960 and Medea in 1961.

Visiting

Outside performance evenings the theatre can be walked at any time during site opening hours; tickets for the festival programme are sold separately. The archaeological museum at the entrance holds finds from the sanctuary, including surgical instruments and the inscribed records of cures, and the ruins of the Sanctuary of Asklepios lie immediately beside the theatre on the same ticket.

The rest of the Argolid is within easy reach. Nafplio, the Venetian-built port that served as the first capital of independent Greece, is about half an hour away by road, and the citadel of Mycenae with its Lion Gate is under an hour. The whole group sits close to the coast, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Greece coast — the harbours of the Argolic and Saronic gulfs are a short drive from the site, so a morning among the ruins and an afternoon at anchor fit into the same day.