The Complete Greek Temples [antikvár]

¦ i , I ¦ Introduction: Temples, Lands and Gods The Parthaion, Athens. A massive manmade platform permitted the building of the Parthenon on a natural slope in the southern part of the Akropolis Such terracing, to create sufficient level ground on a conspicuous site, is common in ancient Greek temple construction. To worship their gods the ancient Greelis created a sacred architecture regarded nowadays as one of the supreme glories of their civilization. For over eight centuries they reserved for their major temples a unique all-stone design comprising a freestanding rectangle of columns raised on a stepped platform and framing an inner building closed by a door, the whole topped by a pitched roof and triangular gables. Over the centuries Greek architects honed and adapted this monumental form, but the essentials never changed. The colonnaded Greek temple constitutes a cultural phenomenon in itself. The Greeks called such a building a tiaos, the dwelling of a deity, whose sacred images normally stood (or sat) inside. They applied this same term to a range of structures on a sliding scale of size and prestige, from the one-room shrine tucked inside a larger public building to the lavish colonnaded temple. This book is concerned with the naos in the fully blown sense just defined, of which nowadays the Parthenon in Athens is the most famous survivor. This emphasis is justified by the attitudes of the ancient Greeks themselves. As we shall see later, the conspicuous sites assigned to colonnaded temples, their architectural intricacy and their cost, their place on the cutting edge of Greek building technology, the importance of the state cults which they served, and the decades or even centuries doggedly devoted to their completion, are all pointers to their exceptionality in their day. So, too, is the very fact of their monumentality and the sense of permanence exuded by tier upon tier of finely dressed masonry In their heyday no other public building in Greece could compare with them in impact and majesty. When simpler shrines were upgraded, the natural route to follow was the addition of a prestigious colonnade (for examples see pp. 138-39,207-8,209,225). The fad for neo-Greek architecture in more recent times (see Epilogue, p. 228) has seen the distinctive forms of the ancient Greek temple adapted for purposes far removed fi'om the original: churches, museums, memorials, even private houses. Partly as a result of this more recent appropriation of ancient Greek sacred ai'chitecture, we are in danger of forgetting that colonnaded temples first and foremost were monuments to the god-fearing piety of the communities which built them. Even the stones which constituted them were sacred and inviolate. According to an ancient anecdote, when a