Heraion
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37°40′19"N 26°53′08"E
The Heraion of Samos was a large sanctuary to the goddess Hera
, in the southern region of Samos
, Greece
, 6 km southwest of the ancient city, in a low, marshy river basin near the sea. The Late Archaic Heraion of Samos was the first of the gigantic free-standing Ionic temples
, but its predecessors at this site reached back to the Geometric Period of the 8th century BC, or earlier. The site of temple's ruins, with its sole standing column, was designated a joint UNESCO
World Heritage Site
, along with the nearby Pythagoreion
in 1992.
The core myth at the heart of the cult of Hera
at Samos is that of her birth. According to the local tradition, the goddess was born under a lygos tree (Vitex agnus-castus
, the "chaste-tree"). At the annual Samian festival called the Toneia, the "binding", the cult image
of Hera was ceremonially bound with lygos branches. The tree still featured on the coinage of Samos
in Roman times.
Many construction phases are known, identified in part through fragments of roof tiles, the first phase dating to the 8th century BC. The first temple, the Hekatompedos, was roughly 100 feet (30.5 m) long and narrow; it consisted of three walls and an interior central line of columns to support a roof structure. A much larger temple was built by the architects Rhoikos
and Theodoros ca. 570-550 BC. The temple
stood opposite the cult altar
of Hera
in her walled and gated temenos
. It was a dipteral temple, that is with a portico of columns two deep, which surrounded it entirely (peripteral). It had a deep square-roofed pronaos in front of a closed cella
. Cella and pronaos were divided into three equal aisles by two rows of columns that marched down the pronaos and through the temple. The result was that Hera was worshipped in a temple fitted within a stylized grove of columns, eight across and twenty-one deep. The columns stood on unusual torus
bases that were horizontally fluted. The Rhoikos temple "must have had central significance for the development of monumental Ionic architecture", Helmut Kyrieleis observes.
Unfortunately it stood for only about a decade before it was destroyed, probably by an earthquake. After the destruction of the "Rhoikos temple", an even larger one was built approximately 40 m to the west. This temple had the largest known floor plan of any Greek temple and is known as the "Polycrates
Temple", named after a tyrant of Samos. One of the giant statues
from the Heraion survives in the Samos Archaeological Museum. Construction continued into the Roman period, but this Heraion was never wholly finished. Instead, the cult image
was housed in Roman imperial times in a smaller structure to the east, which remained in use until the Theodosian edicts of 391 forbade pagan observance. A Christian church occupied the Roman site, employing stone taken from the Roman Heraeum.
The Heraion served as a quarry through Byzantine times, so that it was eventually dismantled to the very foundations. Little information has survived in literary sources. Pausanias
missed Samos in his Periegesis of Greece. Scattered mentions by Herodotus
do not provide a satisfactory substitute. With the exception of the open-air altar and the great temple no other feature of the temenos
is mentioned in a classical source.
The first Westerner to visit the site was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
, commissioned by Louis XIV
to travel in the East and report his findings. Tournefort visited Samos in 1704, and published his drawings of the ruins as engravings. Massive siltation deposits obscured, yet protected the site from amateur tinkering in the 18th and 19th centuries. Reedbeds and thorny brakes of blackberry canes provided daunting cover, and the water table, risen since Antiquity, discouraged trench-digging at the same time that it preserved wooden materials in anoxic strata. Thus the first preliminary archaeological excavations were delayed until 1890-92, under the direction of P. Kavvadias and Th. Sophoulis, from Athens, and the full extent of the third temple's foundations were not revealed until Theodor Wiegand's campaign of 1910-14. Rubble demonstrated that there had been a previous temple.
In 1925 German archaeologists from the German Archaeological Institute at Athens began again at the site; work that was interrupted by the Second World War commenced again in 1951. The site has been minutely described in a series of volumes in German under the general title Samos, which were edited to a high standard, establishing a chronology against which the wide range of votive objects deposited at the Heraion from the 8th century onward can be compared. Helmut Kyrieleis and Hermann J. Kienast took charge of the excavations in 1976.
For commentary on the architectural remains from the sanctuary of Hera on Samos,see B. A. Barletta, The Origins of the Greek Architectural Orders (Cambridge, 2001), passim.
- For other uses, see Heraion (disambiguation)Heraion (disambiguation)A Heraion refers to a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Hera.Several temples of Antiquity, beginning with the Heraion of Samos, were dedicated to Hera...
The Heraion of Samos was a large sanctuary to the goddess Hera
Hera
Hera was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow and the peacock were sacred to her...
, in the southern region of Samos
Samoš
Samoš is a village in Serbia. It is situated in the Kovačica municipality, in the South Banat District, Vojvodina province. The village has a Serb ethnic majority and its population numbering 1,247 people .-See also:...
, Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
, 6 km southwest of the ancient city, in a low, marshy river basin near the sea. The Late Archaic Heraion of Samos was the first of the gigantic free-standing Ionic temples
Ionic order
The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...
, but its predecessors at this site reached back to the Geometric Period of the 8th century BC, or earlier. The site of temple's ruins, with its sole standing column, was designated a joint UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage Site
World Heritage Site
A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the UNESCO as of special cultural or physical significance...
, along with the nearby Pythagoreion
Pythagoreion
The remains of the Pythagoreion, an ancient fortified port with Greek and Roman monuments and a spectacular tunnel, the Tunnel of Eupalinos or Eupalinian aqueduct, along with the Heraion of Samos were jointly registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992....
in 1992.
The core myth at the heart of the cult of Hera
Hera
Hera was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow and the peacock were sacred to her...
at Samos is that of her birth. According to the local tradition, the goddess was born under a lygos tree (Vitex agnus-castus
Vitex agnus-castus
Vitex agnus-castus, also called Vitex, Chaste Tree, Chasteberry, Abraham's Balm or Monk's Pepper, is a native of the Mediterranean region. It is one of the few temperate-zone species of Vitex, which is on the whole a genus of tropical and sub-tropical flowering plants...
, the "chaste-tree"). At the annual Samian festival called the Toneia, the "binding", the cult image
Cult image
In the practice of religion, a cult image is a human-made object that is venerated for the deity, spirit or daemon that it embodies or represents...
of Hera was ceremonially bound with lygos branches. The tree still featured on the coinage of Samos
Ancient Greek coinage
The history of Ancient Greek coinage can be divided into three periods, the Archaic, the Classical, and the Hellenistic. The Archaic period extends from the introduction of coinage to the Greek world in about 600 BCE until the Persian Wars in about 480 BCE...
in Roman times.
Many construction phases are known, identified in part through fragments of roof tiles, the first phase dating to the 8th century BC. The first temple, the Hekatompedos, was roughly 100 feet (30.5 m) long and narrow; it consisted of three walls and an interior central line of columns to support a roof structure. A much larger temple was built by the architects Rhoikos
Rhoecus
Rhoecus was a Samian sculptor of the 6th century BCE. He and his son Theodorus were especially noted for their work in bronze. Herodotus says that Rhoecus built the temple of Hera at Samos, which was destroyed by fire c. 530 BCE. In the temple of Artemis at Ephesus was a marble figure of night by...
and Theodoros ca. 570-550 BC. The temple
Greek temple
Greek temples were structures built to house deity statues within Greek sanctuaries in Greek paganism. The temples themselves did usually not directly serve a cult purpose, since the sacrifices and rituals dedicated to the respective deity took place outside them...
stood opposite the cult altar
Altar
An altar is any structure upon which offerings such as sacrifices are made for religious purposes. Altars are usually found at shrines, and they can be located in temples, churches and other places of worship...
of Hera
Hera
Hera was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow and the peacock were sacred to her...
in her walled and gated temenos
Temenos
Temenos is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, a sanctuary, holy grove or holy precinct: The Pythian race-course is called a temenos, the sacred valley of the Nile is the ...
. It was a dipteral temple, that is with a portico of columns two deep, which surrounded it entirely (peripteral). It had a deep square-roofed pronaos in front of a closed cella
Cella
A cella or naos , is the inner chamber of a temple in classical architecture, or a shop facing the street in domestic Roman architecture...
. Cella and pronaos were divided into three equal aisles by two rows of columns that marched down the pronaos and through the temple. The result was that Hera was worshipped in a temple fitted within a stylized grove of columns, eight across and twenty-one deep. The columns stood on unusual torus
Torus
In geometry, a torus is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle...
bases that were horizontally fluted. The Rhoikos temple "must have had central significance for the development of monumental Ionic architecture", Helmut Kyrieleis observes.
Unfortunately it stood for only about a decade before it was destroyed, probably by an earthquake. After the destruction of the "Rhoikos temple", an even larger one was built approximately 40 m to the west. This temple had the largest known floor plan of any Greek temple and is known as the "Polycrates
Polycrates
Polycrates , son of Aeaces, was the tyrant of Samos from c. 538 BC to 522 BC.He took power during a festival of Hera with his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, but soon had Pantagnotus killed and exiled Syloson to take full control for himself. He then allied with Amasis II, pharaoh of Egypt, as...
Temple", named after a tyrant of Samos. One of the giant statues
Kouros
A kouros is the modern term given to those representations of male youths which first appear in the Archaic period in Greece. The term kouros, meaning youth, was first proposed for what were previously thought to be depictions of Apollo by V. I...
from the Heraion survives in the Samos Archaeological Museum. Construction continued into the Roman period, but this Heraion was never wholly finished. Instead, the cult image
Cult image
In the practice of religion, a cult image is a human-made object that is venerated for the deity, spirit or daemon that it embodies or represents...
was housed in Roman imperial times in a smaller structure to the east, which remained in use until the Theodosian edicts of 391 forbade pagan observance. A Christian church occupied the Roman site, employing stone taken from the Roman Heraeum.
The Heraion served as a quarry through Byzantine times, so that it was eventually dismantled to the very foundations. Little information has survived in literary sources. Pausanias
Pausanias (geographer)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...
missed Samos in his Periegesis of Greece. Scattered mentions by Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
do not provide a satisfactory substitute. With the exception of the open-air altar and the great temple no other feature of the temenos
Temenos
Temenos is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, a sanctuary, holy grove or holy precinct: The Pythian race-course is called a temenos, the sacred valley of the Nile is the ...
is mentioned in a classical source.
The first Westerner to visit the site was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants.- Biography :...
, commissioned by Louis XIV
Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...
to travel in the East and report his findings. Tournefort visited Samos in 1704, and published his drawings of the ruins as engravings. Massive siltation deposits obscured, yet protected the site from amateur tinkering in the 18th and 19th centuries. Reedbeds and thorny brakes of blackberry canes provided daunting cover, and the water table, risen since Antiquity, discouraged trench-digging at the same time that it preserved wooden materials in anoxic strata. Thus the first preliminary archaeological excavations were delayed until 1890-92, under the direction of P. Kavvadias and Th. Sophoulis, from Athens, and the full extent of the third temple's foundations were not revealed until Theodor Wiegand's campaign of 1910-14. Rubble demonstrated that there had been a previous temple.
In 1925 German archaeologists from the German Archaeological Institute at Athens began again at the site; work that was interrupted by the Second World War commenced again in 1951. The site has been minutely described in a series of volumes in German under the general title Samos, which were edited to a high standard, establishing a chronology against which the wide range of votive objects deposited at the Heraion from the 8th century onward can be compared. Helmut Kyrieleis and Hermann J. Kienast took charge of the excavations in 1976.
For commentary on the architectural remains from the sanctuary of Hera on Samos,see B. A. Barletta, The Origins of the Greek Architectural Orders (Cambridge, 2001), passim.