In our trip to Greece we have visited the stunning ruins of the temple of Bassae, dedicated by the ancient inhabitants of Phigalia to Apollo Epicurius, the god solar and healer who had come to help them when they were beset by an epidemic of the plague, during the war of the Peloponnese. It was built in the 5th century B.C. (in the opinion of Pausanias by the architect Ictinos, the constructer of the Parthenon, on the place of an earlier temple) near the present village of Andritsaina, on a mount 1130 m high, and belongs to the fist generation of post-Parthenonian buildings. It remained undiscovered because of its isolation, until a French architect came upon it accidentally in 1765 and brought it to the attention of the academic world; the archeological investigation were profitable but prejudicial to the integrity of the monument, that was divested of the internal architrave of the cella, with the Ionic 22 frieze’s sculptured plates (with the Centauromachy and the Amazonomachy, maybe sculpted by Kallimachos), acquired in 1814 by order of the future king George IV of England and transferred to the British Museum with the oldest Corinthian capital. It was restored in 1902 and in 1965 and is now entirely shored up and covered by a tent (the restoration and consolidation works continue), because its critical state. The peripteral building, 39.87 m long and 16.13 m large, is oriented to the north and not to the east, as usual. In Doric order is the outer colonnade, with preserved architraves and six columns on the fronts and fifteen on the sides, and the front of the pronaos and the opisthodomos (that didn’t give access to the temple), with two in antis columns. In the cella are two rows (that form a sort of lateral niches) of four imbedded Ionic columns standing against and in parallel with low support walls, each ending with an imbedded diagonal Corinthian column. Between them, in the centre of the temple, is one alone Corinthian column, the most ancient conserved, that separated the cella and the adyton, the room where was conserved the statue of the god, with an opening on the east wall, direction in which were oriented all the other temples. The walls, the bases and the tambours of the columns are made of local grey limestone and the Ionic and Corinthian capitals, the sculptured metopes on the exterior frieze of the cella, the plates of the Ionic frieze which runs along the inside of the sanctuary, the guttae, the roof supports and the roofing tiles are made of Doliana marble.

This temple is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, because of the quality of its architecture, even if I was at first disappointed by the tent that cover it and by its state of conservation. It’s absolutely worth to be visited (even if it’s difficult to get there), also because it is one of the most preserved Greek temples and the most unusual one, and justifies the inscription.

Photo: Bassae – Temple of Apollo Epicurius