From the rock of Sounio, Aegeas, the mythical king of Athens, after seeing the ship that had taken Theseus's son back to Crete returning with black sails in order for the latter to kill the Minotaur and exempt Athens from the blood tax, thought that Theseus was dead and in despair he was thrown into the sea and killed. Since then the sea has been called the Aegean Sea.
Homer is the first to mention Sounio, describing it as the "sacred cape of the Athenians" (Odyssey, c 278). Specifically, he mentions that there Menelaus, on his return journey from Troy, stopped to bury the helmsman of his ship, Frontis, who was struck by Apollo. The human presence in the area, however, has been witnessed since prehistoric times, but without being associated with any significant cult. Early Bronze Age tombs (3rd millennium BC) have been identified.
Today Sounio is mainly known to us for the Temple of Poseidon that returns its peak. The sanctity of the place, however, dates back to a much earlier era. It seems that already from the 8th c. e.g. the rock that dominated the end of Attica, 73 meters above sea level, was dedicated to the worship of Poseidon, since the Acropolis worshiped the goddess Athena, who won with her gift, the olive, the competition for the name city's.
During the early archaic period there may have been a simple altar in the mosque, in front of which they were erected in the 6th c. two colossal monumental statues of Kouros, indicative of the sacred character of the place. Parts of these statues were found in a depository, with the leading among them the homonymous Kouros of Sounio, which was 3 meters high and is one of the earliest samples of the monumental archaic sculpture. One can admire it at the National Archaeological Museum. Only at the beginning of the 5th c. e.g. The construction of a Doric temple began, but it was destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC, before it was completed.
The Doric temple we see today was built of local marble of Agrileza on the ruins of the archaic temple in the years of Pericles (449 / 8-440 BC). The classical church presents several architectural peculiarities, with the omission of the colonnade inside the nave and the extremely radial proportions of the columns leading to the top. Important peculiarities are also presented by the sculptural decoration, which appears on the interior sides of the church for the first time in ancient Greek church building.
A relief frieze made of Parian marble, representing the usual complexes of fighting Gods and Giants (Gigantomachia) or Lapiths and Centaurs (Centaur Battle), circled with Theseus's feats all the inner sides of the pronaos above the prunal. This is an allegory of the victory of the Greeks against the Persians, led by the Athenians, of the supremacy of the Athenian democracy over the Eastern totalitarianism. Also, the metopes of the occasion did not have relief representations but were left white and unadorned. It is attributed to the same architect who designed the temples of Hephaestus ("Thissio") in the Agora, Areos in Acharnes and Nemesis in Ramnounta, whose name, unfortunately, was not saved.
19 фев 2022
