Asklepieion

The Asklepieion stands on a wooded hillside about 4 kilometres inland from Kos Town, on the lower slopes of the Dikeos mountains above the village of Platani, its three ancient terraces rising one above the other and looking out over the town and the sea toward the Turkish coast. Founded around the 4th century BC as a sanctuary to Asclepius, the god of medicine, it grew into one of the most important healing centres of the ancient Mediterranean, in continuous use for more than 800 years and counted among several hundred such sanctuaries built across the Greek world. The position was chosen for practical as much as scenic reasons: the hillside had spring water, clean air and room for the sanctuary to expand terrace by terrace over several centuries.

Hippocrates and the Medical School of Kos

The site's fame rests largely on its association with Hippocrates, born on Kos around 460 BC and remembered as the father of Western medicine. He came from a family of physicians: his father Heraclides practised before him, and his sons Thessalus and Draco after him. He died at Larissa in Thessaly around 370 BC, at roughly ninety years of age. His decisive contribution was to treat illness as having natural causes rather than divine ones, separating medicine from religion and superstition and grounding diagnosis in careful observation of the patient. The body of some 70 works later gathered under his name in Alexandria, known as the Hippocratic Corpus, together with the oath still associated with him, shaped medical teaching for the next two thousand years. The school of medicine that grew up on Kos in his wake is what drew patients to this hillside from across the Greek world.

Walking the Three Terraces

The sanctuary was laid out on three artificial terraces linked by broad flights of steps, and each level had a distinct role. The lowest carried the entrance gateway, colonnaded porticoes, patient accommodation and, in the Roman period, bath buildings, with spring water feeding the complex. The middle terrace held the sanctuary's oldest structure, a large altar dating to the middle of the 4th century BC, beside an Ionic temple of Asclepius of the 3rd century BC and a smaller, later temple of Apollo whose seven Corinthian columns were re-erected by excavators and now form the most photographed feature of the site. The uppermost terrace was dominated by the great Doric temple of Asclepius, built in the first half of the 2nd century BC and enclosed by a colonnade. The sanctuary's standing as an inviolable sacred precinct was formally recognised across the Greek world in 260 BC, under the Ptolemies, which gave pilgrims safe passage even in wartime.

Ruin, Rediscovery and the Site Today

Two major earthquakes, in 469 and 554 AD, brought the buildings down, and the sanctuary was never rebuilt. Centuries later the Knights of Saint John quarried the ruins for cut stone, carting columns and marble blocks down to the coast for the Nerantzia Castle that guards Kos harbour, where ancient fragments can still be picked out in the walls today. The site itself was effectively lost until 9 October 1902, when the German scholar Rudolf Herzog, working with the local antiquarian Iakovos Zarraftis, identified it. Herzog excavated between 1902 and 1905 under Ottoman administration, and Italian archaeologists continued the work through the 1920s and 1930s, turning up statues, inscriptions and surgical instruments that are now among the most valuable evidence we have for ancient medical practice.

What visitors see now is a terraced hillside of foundations, staircases and standing columns with an unusually good view: on a clear day the whole of Kos Town, the strait and the Turkish coast opposite are laid out below. The site is close enough to town to reach in a few minutes by road, which is why so many shore excursions pair it with time on the water, and the Asklepieion remains a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Kos who want to combine ancient history with a day at sea.