Travels through History : The Peloponnese – Bassae

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book called Travels through History : The Peloponnese.

The full title of this magnificent building is the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. The temple is undergoing extensive renovations, so much so that it’s completely enclosed in a massive white tent. You may well see the white tent glinting in the sunlight through the trees from many miles away. Bassae was the first Greek site to be inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1986. 

Built of grey limestone in the 5th Century BC by the Phigaleians, the temple was dedicated to the god of healing and the sun. The Phigaleians believed this god had protected them from plague and invasion. The plague was probably the Athenian plague of 430 BC. Bassae temple has been subject to extensive conservation since 1965. Facing north, as opposed to the normal east-west axis, the temple contains the oldest known Corinthian column at its southern end. 

Two friezes representing battles between Greeks and Amazons and Lapiths and Centaurs, now in the British Museum in London, used to decorate the interior of the naos of this temple, the earliest example of a sculptured frieze decorating the interior of a Greek building. The Lapiths were a mythical people in Thessaly who, under King Pirithous, fought and conquered the Centaurs. This conflict was used to represent the triumph of civilisation over barbarism and of Greece over Persia. 

In 174 AD, the ancient traveller Pausanias admired the beauty and harmony of the temple and attributed it to Iktinos, the architect of the Parthenon, though there appears to be no evidence for this that has survived to the modern day. Pausanias is the only ancient traveller whose remarks on Bassae have survived.

Soon after his visit, the temple appears to have been forgotten for almost 1700 years. It was only in the 18th century that the temple attracted interest from scholars and artists once again. 

The French architect J. Bocher found the temple in November 1765. He was building villas on Zante (known today as Zakynthos on the Ionian islands) and came upon it quite by accident. When he returned for a second look, bandits murdered him. Charles Robert Cockerell, an English archaeologist and Carl Haller von Hallerstein from Germany came upon the site in 1811. They were looking for sculptures to sell to major museums.