Temple of Aphaia

On the eastern side of the island of Aegina, in the Saronic Gulf, a limestone peak rising to about 160 metres above the sea carries one of the best-preserved Doric temples in Greece: the Temple of Aphaia. The sanctuary stands roughly 13 kilometres by road from Aegina's main port, and the island itself lies only some 27 kilometres from Athens, about forty minutes from Piraeus by hydrofoil, which has made the temple a standard excursion for travellers since the nineteenth century. What sets it apart from other Greek temples is not only how much of it survives, but the fact that it was raised for a goddess worshipped almost nowhere else.

The Goddess of a Single Hilltop

Aphaia began as a local deity connected with fertility and the farming year, and cult activity on this hill has been traced back to the 14th century BC through finds of Late Bronze Age female figurines. Later Greek writers folded her into a wider myth. Pausanias identifies her with Britomartis, a Cretan nymph who fled the advances of Minos and threw herself into nets set for fish, after which Artemis made her a goddess; the Cretans called her Diktynna, she of the nets, while on Aegina she was Aphaia. As Athenian influence over the island grew she was increasingly assimilated to Athena and Artemis, and by the time Pausanias was writing in the second century AD that identification was standard. Her worship nonetheless remained extraordinarily local: an inscribed potsherd of the fifth century BC from Bassae in Arcadia may be the only dedication to her ever found away from Aegina.

From Bronze Age Shrine to Doric Temple

The hilltop was sacred long before any temple stood on it. An altar and a treasury were already in place by about 700 BC, and a mid-seventh-century inscription from the site records a priest building a house for the goddess. A first proper temple, with a pronaos and an adyton, went up before 570 BC and burned down around 510 BC. The building visible today, generally dated to about 500 BC, replaced it.

It is a hexastyle peripteral temple on a six-by-twelve column plan, its platform measuring roughly 15.5 by 30.5 metres, set inside a walled sanctuary of about 80 metres square on a terrace some 40 by 80 metres. Within the cella, two rows of five columns rose in two tiers to carry the roof, one of the earliest known uses of the double-stacked colonnade that later became characteristic of Doric architecture. The fabric is local limestone finished with stucco, with marble reserved for the roof tiles, the antefixes and the sculpture, and all but three of the outer columns were cut as monoliths rather than assembled from drums. Worshippers entered through a propylon on the south-east; a raised paved platform linked the temple to its altar, a cistern lay at the north-eastern edge of the precinct, a small treasury stood just east of the propylon, and a column fourteen metres high, crowned by a sphinx, stood before the building. The altar itself was rebuilt when the new temple went up.

The Aegina Marbles and the Archaeologists

What makes Aphaia central to the history of Greek art is its pair of pedimental sculpture groups, carved during the transition from the Archaic to the Early Classical style. The east pediment shows the earlier Trojan War, in which Heracles campaigns against king Laomedon; the west pediment shows the later, Homeric war, with Ajax son of Telamon among its figures. In 1811 the architect Charles Robert Cockerell and the scholar Otto Magnus von Stackelberg removed them from the site, and the following year they were sold to the crown prince who would become King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen restored them, and they have been on display in the Glyptothek in Munich ever since.

Systematic archaeology followed. The east peribolos wall was investigated in 1894, and Adolf Furtwängler excavated for the German Archaeological Institute at Athens in the opening years of the twentieth century. A second and far larger German campaign ran from 1966 to 1979 under Dieter Ohly, and in 1969 it uncovered substantial remains of the sixth-century temple buried in the later terrace fill; work continued under Ernst-Ludwig Schwandner and Martha Ohly until 1988. Parts of the entablature and several columns were re-erected between 1956 and 1960, which is why the colonnade reads so clearly today even though the roof collapsed long ago.

The Temple and the Island Today

Aegina is a small island, about 87 square kilometres with roughly 13,000 inhabitants, some 7,000 of them in the port town, but it was a serious naval and commercial power in the Archaic period. Its weight standard was one of the two in general use across the Greek world, and a stater stamped with a sea turtle, struck here around 700 BC, ranks among the earliest coins produced in Europe. Aegina fought at Salamis in 480 BC, was forced into subjection by Athens in the 450s and had its population expelled in 431 BC; the sanctuary's prominence faded along with the island's independence. Other traces of that era survive near the port at Kolona, where a single column of a temple of Apollo still stands.

The site remains open under the care of the Greek archaeological service, a short drive up from the harbour past the pistachio groves that have been the island's main crop since the 1890s. Its hilltop position and the sweeping views over the Saronic Gulf are a good part of the appeal, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Greece coast, taking in Aphaia's columns from the water before continuing to the island's other historic sites.