I know you know that, yet do you ever wonder how many who’ve
never been to Greece but have seen so many photographs of this Temple of
Poseidon at Cape Sounion might think that it is? I mean, let’s face it, both sit on the top of
a hill, have majestic marble columns, and were built in the mid-5th Century
BCE during the golden days of Pericles.
And to complicate matters, there is a Temple of Hephaistos very near the
acropolis in Athens that closely resembles what the Sounion temple probably looked like in
its glory days. (I wrote “acropolis of Athens” because many places have an
acropolis. The word literally means top
of the hill (acron) city (polis), and it was quite common for ancient Greeks to
build a fortified citadel on high ground in their city that would be called
an “acropolis.”)
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| Temple of Hephaistos, Athens |
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| Harry's Greece Guide |
Cape Sounion is about an hour’s drive southeast of Athens’
center (without traffic), and aside from being one of Greece’s most popular
tourist day trips, it is home to some of the most expensive residential real
estate in Greece. It is at the tip of a
peninsula, and a drive along either coastline (particularly the east side) has
you wondering how a place as pretty and green as this could be so close to
Athens (hold the mail, please).
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| Theseus and the Minotaur |
Legend has it that the Temple sits at the very spot where
Aegeus, King of Athens, leaped to his death when he wrongfully thought his son,
Theseus, had died battling the King of Crete’s dreaded half-man, half-bull Minotaur
in the labyrinth of Crete. Aegeus had
told his son that the ship returning from Crete with news of his battle should
hoist a white sail if he’d survived and a black if he’d not. But Theseus forgot and came in under black
sail. Bye-bye daddy. But it wasn’t a total loss, for the Aegean
Sea took its name from the mourning king.
The original Temple of Poseidon was made of limestone and was
destroyed by the Persians in 480 BCE. After
the defeat of the Persians, a new temple was built around 440 BCE, this time of
white marble. Fifteen of the original
forty-two columns still stand 200 feet above the sea in testament to Poseidon,
god of the sea, subservient in power only to Zeus the supreme.
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| Lord Byron |
Sounion is first mentioned in literature around the 8th
Century BCE by Homer in The Odyssey
as the place where Menelaos stopped to bury his helmsman during the return to Troy. Perhaps its most famous
more modern admirer was Lord Byron (1788-1824) who wrote in his poem Isles of Greece:
Place me on Sunium's marbled steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep…
Too bad he hadn’t confined his admiration to pen and paper.
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| Scene of the Crime |
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| The culprit's calling card. |
When I visited Sounion last week I limited any record of my
presence to the digital photo card of my iPhone. Here are few more firsthand glimpses of a
sight that has inspired gods and mortals alike for millennia. For better examples of what so attracts photographers
and romantics to the place, check out this YouTube
link.
Jeff—Saturday
