1.
Athena
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Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is the goddess of wisdom, craft, and war in ancient Greek religion and mythology. Minerva is the Roman goddess identified with Athena, Athena is known for her calm temperament, as she moves slowly to anger. She is noted to have fought for just reasons. Athena is portrayed as a companion of heroes and is the patron goddess of heroic endeavour. She is the patroness of Athens. The Athenians founded the Parthenon on the Acropolis of her city, Athens. Veneration of Athena was so persistent that archaic myths about her were recast to adapt to cultural changes, in her role as a protector of the city, many people throughout the Greek world worshipped Athena as Athena Polias. While the city of Athens and the goddess Athena essentially bear the same name, Athena is associated with Athens, a plural name, because it was the place where she presided over her sisterhood, the Athenai, in earliest times. Mycenae was the city where the Goddess was called Mykene, at Thebes she was called Thebe, and the city again a plural, Thebae. Similarly, at Athens she was called Athena, and the city Athenae, Athena had a special relationship with Athens, as is shown by the etymological connection of the names of the goddess and the city. According to mythical lore, she competed with Poseidon and she won by creating the olive tree, the Athenians would accept her gift and name the city after her. In history, the citizens of Athens built a statue of Athena as a temple to the goddess, which had piercing eyes, a helmet on her head, attired with an aegis or cuirass, and an extremely long spear. It also had a shield with the head of the Gorgon on it. A large snake accompanied her and she held Nike, the goddess of victory, therefore, Mylonas believes that Athena was a Mycenaean creation. On the other hand, Nilsson claims that she was the goddess of the palace who protected the king, a-ta-no-dju-wa-ja is also found in Linear A Minoan, the final part being regarded as the Linear A Minoan equivalent of the Linear B Mycenaean di-u-ja or di-wi-ja. Divine Athena also was a weaver and the deity of crafts, whether her name is attested in Eteocretan or not will have to wait for decipherment of Linear A. Perhaps, however, the name Theonoe may mean she who knows divine things better than others. Thus for Plato her name was to be derived from Greek Ἀθεονόα, Plato also noted that the citizens of Sais in Egypt worshipped a goddess whose Egyptian name was Neith, and which was identified with Athena. Neith was the war goddess and huntress deity of the Egyptians since the ancient Pre-Dynastic period, in addition, ancient Greek myths reported that Athena had visited many mythological places such as Libyas Triton River in North Africa and the Phlegraean plain
2.
Classical Greece
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Classical Greece was a period of around 200 years in Greek culture. This Classical period saw the annexation of much of modern-day Greece by the Persian Empire, Classical Greece had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire and on the foundations of western civilization. Much of modern Western politics, artistic thought, scientific thought, theatre, literature, in the context of the art, architecture, and culture of Ancient Greece, the Classical period, sometimes called the Hellenic period, corresponds to most of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. The Classical period in this sense follows the Archaic period and is in turn succeeded by the Hellenistic period and this century is essentially studied from the Athenian outlook because Athens has left us more narratives, plays, and other written works than the other ancient Greek states. From the perspective of Athenian culture in Classical Greece, the period referred to as the 5th century BC extends slightly into the 4th century BC. In this context, one might consider that the first significant event of this occurs in 508 BC, with the fall of the last Athenian tyrant. However, a view of the whole Greek world might place its beginning at the Ionian Revolt of 500 BC. The Persians were defeated in 490 BC, the Delian League then formed, under Athenian hegemony and as Athens instrument. Athens excesses caused several revolts among the cities, all of which were put down by force. After both forces were spent, a brief peace came about, then the war resumed to Spartas advantage, Athens was definitively defeated in 404 BC, and internal Athenian agitations mark the end of the 5th century BC in Greece. Since its beginning, Sparta had been ruled by a diarchy and this meant that Sparta had two kings ruling concurrently throughout its entire history. The two kingships were both hereditary, vested in the Agiad dynasty and the Eurypontid dynasty, according to legend, the respective hereditary lines of these two dynasties sprang from Eurysthenes and Procles, twin descendants of Hercules. They were said to have conquered Sparta two generations after the Trojan War, in 510 BC, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow their king, the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. Cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy headed by Isagoras, but his rival Cleisthenes, with the support of the middle class and aided by democrats, took over. Cleomenes intervened in 508 and 506 BC, but could not stop Cleisthenes, through his reforms, the people endowed their city with isonomic institutions — i. e. with equal rights for all —and established ostracism. The isonomic and isegoric democracy was first organized into about 130 demes, the 10,000 citizens exercised their power as members of the assembly, headed by a council of 500 citizens chosen at random. The territory of the city was divided into thirty trittyes as follows, ten trittyes in the coastal region ten trittyes in the ἄστυ. A tribe consisted of three trittyes, selected at random, one each of the three groups
3.
Caryatid
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A caryatid is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term karyatides literally means maidens of Karyai, an ancient town of Peloponnese, the best-known and most-copied examples are those of the six figures of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis at Athens. One of those original six figures, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, is now in the British Museum in London, the Acropolis Museum holds the other five figures, which are replaced onsite by replicas. The five originals that are in Athens are now being exhibited in the new Acropolis Museum, the pedestal for the Caryatid removed to London remains empty. From 2011 to 2015, they were cleaned by a specially constructed laser beam, each Caryatid was cleaned in place, with a television circuit relaying the spectacle live to museum visitors. Their bulky, intricately arranged hairstyles serve the purpose of providing static support to their necks. The Romans also copied the Erechtheion caryatids, installing copies in the Forum of Augustus and the Pantheon in Rome, another Roman example, found on the Via Appia, is the Townley Caryatid. Early interior examples are the figures of Hercules and Iole carved on the jambs of a fireplace in the Sala della Jole of the Doges Palace, Venice. In the following century Jacopo Sansovino, both sculptor and architect, carved a pair of female figures supporting the shelf of a marble chimneypiece at Villa Garzoni, near Padua. No architect mentioned the device until 1615, when Palladios pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi included a chapter devoted to chimneypieces in his Idea della archittura universale. In the early 17th century, interior examples appear in Jacobean interiors in England, many caryatids lined up on the facade of the 1893 Palace of the Arts housing the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In the arts of design, the draped figure supporting an acanthus-grown basket capital taking the form of a candlestick or a table-support is a familiar cliché of neoclassical decorative arts, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota has caryatids as a motif on its eastern facade. Auguste Rodins 1881 sculpture Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone shows a fallen caryatid, robert Heinlein described this piece in Stranger in a Strange Land, Now here we have another emotional symbol. For almost three years or longer, architects have designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures. After all those centuries it took Rodin to see that this was too heavy for a girl. Here is this poor little caryatid who has tried — and failed and she didnt give up, Ben, shes still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. The origins of the term are unclear and it is first recorded in the Latin form caryatides by the Roman architect Vitruvius. However, Vitruvius explanation is doubtful, well before the Persian Wars, female figures were used as supports in Greece
4.
Dorians
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The Dorians were one of the four major ethnic groups among which the Hellenes of Classical Greece considered themselves divided. They are almost always referred to as just the Dorians, as they are called in the earliest literary mention of them in the Odyssey, and yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian, and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, but not always, Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. In the 5th century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek ethne, whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War, the degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as Ionian or Dorian has itself been disputed. At one extreme Édouard Will concludes that there was no true ethnic component in fifth-century Greek culture, at the other extreme John Alty reinterprets the sources to conclude that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions. Moderns viewing these ethnic identifications through the fifth- and fourth-century BC literary tradition have been influenced by their own social politics. Accounts vary as to the Dorians’ place of origin, mythology gave them a Greek origin and eponymous founder, Dorus son of Hellen, the mythological patriarch of the Hellenes. The origin of the Dorians is a multi-faceted concept, in modern scholarship the term often has meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical Proto-Greek speaking population. This dialect is known from records of classical northwest Greece, the Peloponnesus and Crete, a historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the Return of the Heracleidai and by moderns the Dorian Invasion. This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece, no other records than Mycenaean are known to have existed in the Bronze Age, so a West Greek of that time and place cannot be proved or disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times, unlike the East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. This provides circumstantial evidence that the Doric dialect disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, most scholars doubt that the Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenean civilization. The source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnesus remains unattested by any solid evidence, though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and Sicily, in what is now southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the Dorian Hexapolis, Halikarnassos and Knidos in Asia Minor, Kos, and Lindos, Kameiros and these six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Other such Dorian colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, a mans name, Dōrieus, occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos, one of the regions later invaded and subjugated by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the case as do-ri-je-we, *Dōriēwei. An unattested nominative plural, *Dōriēwes, would have become Dōrieis by loss of the w, the tablet records the grain rations issued to the servants of religious dignitaries celebrating a religious festival of Potnia, the mother goddess. The nominative singular, Dōrieus, remained the same in the classical period, many Linear B names of servants were formed from their home territory or the places where they came into Mycenaean ownership
5.
Pottery of ancient Greece
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The shards of pots discarded or buried in the 1st millennium BC are still the best guide available to understand the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks. There were various specific regional varieties, such as the South Italian ancient Greek pottery, throughout these places, various types and shapes of vases were used. Some were highly decorative and meant for consumption and domestic beautification as much as serving a storage or other function. As the culture recovered Sub-Mycenaean pottery finally blended into the Protogeometric style, the rise of vase painting saw increasing decoration. Geometric art in Greek pottery was contiguous with the late Dark Age and early Archaic Greece, the pottery produced in Archaic and Classical Greece included at first black-figure pottery, yet other styles emerged such as red-figure pottery and the white ground technique. Styles such as West Slope Ware were characteristic of the subsequent Hellenistic period, interest in Greek art lagged behind the revival of classical scholarship during the Renaissance and revived in the academic circle round Nicholas Poussin in Rome in the 1630s. Though modest collections of vases recovered from ancient tombs in Italy were made in the 15th and 16th centuries these were regarded as Etruscan. It is possible that Lorenzo de Medici bought several Attic vases directly from Greece and it was Gerhard who first outlined the chronology we now use, namely, Orientalizing, Black Figure, Red Figure, Polychromatic. Where the 19th century was a period of discovery and the out of first principles the 20th century has been one of consolidation. Efforts to record and publish the totality of public collections of vases began with the creation of the Corpus vasorum antiquorum under Edmond Pottier, Beazley and others following him have also studied fragments of Greek pottery in institutional collections, and have attributed many painted pieces to individual artists. Scholars have called these fragments disjecta membra and in a number of instances have been able to identify fragments now in different collections that belong to the same vase, some vase shapes were especially associated with rituals, others with athletics and the gymnasium. Within each category the forms are roughly the same in scale and whether open or closed, some have a purely ritual function, for example white ground lekythoi contained the oil used as funerary offerings and appear to have been made solely with that object in mind. Many examples have a second cup inside them to give the impression of being full of oil. There was a market for Greek pottery since the 8th century BC. An idea of the extent of trade can be gleaned from plotting the find maps of these vases outside of Greece. Only the existence of a second hand market could account for the number of found in Etruscan tombs. South Italian wares came to dominate the trade in the Western Mediterranean as Athens declined in political importance during the Hellenistic period. The process of making a pot and firing it is fairly simple, the first thing a potter needs is clay
6.
Metope
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Metopes often had painted or sculptural decoration, the most famous example are the 92 metopes of the Parthenon marbles some of which depict the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. The painting on most metopes has been lost, but sufficient traces remain to allow an idea of their original appearance. In terms of structure, metopes may be carved from a block with a triglyph, or they may be cut separately. Sometimes the metopes and friezes were cut from different stone, so as to provide color contrast, although they tend to be close to square in shape, some metopes are noticeably larger in height or in width. Classical architecture Classical order Doric order Robertson, D. S. Handbook of Greek and Roman Architecture
7.
Temple
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A temple is a structure reserved for religious or spiritual rituals and activities such as prayer and sacrifice. It is typically used for such buildings belonging to all faiths where a specific term such as church. These include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism among religions with many modern followers, the form and function of temples is thus very variable, though they are often considered by believers to be in some sense the house of one or more deities. Typically offerings of some sort are made to the deity, and other rituals enacted, the degree to which the whole population of believers can access the building varies significantly, often parts or even the whole main building can only be accessed by the clergy. Temples typically have a building and a larger precinct, which may contain many other buildings. The word comes from Ancient Rome, where a templum constituted a sacred precinct as defined by a priest and it has the same root as the word template, a plan in preparation of the building that was marked out on the ground by the augur. Templa also became associated with the places of a god or gods. Hindu temples are large and magnificent with a rich history, there is evidence of use of sacred ground as far back as the Bronze Age and later the Indus Valley Civilization. Hindu temples have been built in countries around the world, including Cambodia, Nepal, Mauritius, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Great Britain. They include the structures called stupa, wat and pagoda in different regions, Temples in Buddhism represent the pure land or pure environment of a Buddha. Traditional Buddhist temples are designed to inspire inner and outer peace, a Jain temple is the place of worship for Jains, the followers of Jainism. Some famous Jain temples are Shikharji, Palitana Jain Temples, Ranakpur Jain Temple, Shravan Belgola, Dilwara Temples, Jain temples are built with various architectural designs. Jain temples in North India are completely different from the Jain temples in South India, additionally, a Manastambha is a pillar that is often constructed in front of Jain temples. The temple of Mesopotamia derived from the cult of gods and deities in the Mesopotamian religion and it spanned several civilizations, from Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. Ancient Egyptian temples were meant as places for the deities to reside on earth, indeed, the term the Egyptians most commonly used to describe the temple building, ḥwt-nṯr, means mansion of a god. A gods presence in the temple linked the human and divine realms and these rituals, it was believed, sustained the god and allowed it to continue to play its proper role in nature. They were therefore a key part of the maintenance of maat, maintaining maat was the entire purpose of Egyptian religion, and thus it was the purpose of a temple as well. Ancient Egyptian temples were also of significance to Egyptian society
8.
Doric order
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The Doric order was one of the three orders of ancient Greek and later Roman architecture, the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Doric is most easily recognised by the simple circular capitals at the top of columns and it was the earliest and in its essence the simplest of the orders, though still with complex details in the entablature above. The Greek Doric column was fluted or smooth-surfaced, and had no base, the capital was a simple circular form, with some mouldings, under a square cushion that is very wide in early versions, but later more restrained. In stone they are purely ornamental, the relatively uncommon Roman and Renaissance Doric retained these, and often introduced thin layers of moulding or further ornament, as well as often using plain columns. The Doric order was used in Greek Revival architecture from the 18th century onwards, often earlier Greek versions were used, with wider columns. Since at least Vitruvius it has been customary for writers to associate the Doric with masculine virtues and it is also normally the cheapest of the orders to use. In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the pavement of a temple without a base. The Parthenon has the Doric design columns and it was most popular in the Archaic Period in mainland Greece, and also found in Magna Graecia, as in the three temples at Paestum. These are in the Archaic Doric, where the capitals spread wide from the column compared to later Classical forms, pronounced features of both Greek and Roman versions of the Doric order are the alternating triglyphs and metopes. The triglyphs are decoratively grooved with two vertical grooves and represent the original wooden end-beams, which rest on the plain architrave that occupies the half of the entablature. Under each triglyph are peglike stagons or guttae that appear as if they were hammered in from below to stabilize the post-and-beam construction and they also served to organize rainwater runoff from above. The spaces between the triglyphs are the metopes and they may be left plain, or they may be carved in low relief. The spacing of the triglyphs caused problems which some time to resolve. The architecture followed rules of harmony, since the original design probably came from wooden temples and the triglyphs were real heads of wooden beams, every column had to bear a beam which lay across the centre of the column. Triglyphs were arranged regularly, the last triglyph was centred upon the last column and this was regarded as the ideal solution which had to be reached. Changing to stone instead of wooden beams required full support of the architrave load at the last column. At the first temples the final triglyph was moved, still terminating the sequence, even worse, the last triglyph was not centered with the corresponding column. That “archaic” manner was not regarded as a harmonious design, the resulting problem is called the doric corner conflict
9.
Priest
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A priest or priestess, is a person authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites, in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of and their office or position is the priesthood, a term which also may apply to such persons collectively. The necessity to read sacred texts and keep temple or church records helped foster literacy in early societies. Priests exist in many religions today, such as all or some branches of Judaism, Christianity, the question of which religions have a priest depends on how the titles of leaders are used or translated into English. In some cases, leaders are more like those that other believers will often turn to for advice on spiritual matters, for example, clergy in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are priests, but in Protestant Christianity they are typically minister and pastor. The terms priest and priestess are sufficiently generic that they may be used in a sense to describe the religious mediators of an unknown or otherwise unspecified religion. In many religions, being a priest or priestess is a full-time position, many Christian priests and pastors choose or are mandated to dedicate themselves to their churches and receive their living directly from their churches. In other cases it is a part-time role, for example, in the early history of Iceland the chieftains were titled goði, a word meaning priest. In some religions, being a priest or priestess is by election or human choice. In Judaism the priesthood is inherited in familial lines, in a theocracy, a society is governed by its priesthood. The word priest, is derived from Greek, via Latin presbyter. Old High German also has the disyllabic priester, priestar, apparently derived from Latin independently via Old French presbtre, the Latin presbyter ultimately represents Greek presbyteros, the regular Latin word for priest being sacerdos, corresponding to Greek hiereus. That English should have only the term priest to translate presbyter. The feminine English noun, priestess, was coined in the 17th century, in the 20th century, the word was used in controversies surrounding the ordination of women. In the case of the ordination of women in the Anglican communion, it is common to speak of priests. In historical polytheism, a priest administers the sacrifice to a deity, in the Ancient Near East, the priesthood also acted on behalf of the deities in managing their property. Priestesses in antiquity often performed sacred prostitution, and in Ancient Greece, some such as Pythia, priestess at Delphi. Sumerian and Akkadian Entu or EN were top-ranking priestesses who were distinguished with special ceremonial attire and they owned property, transacted business, and initiated the hieros gamos ceremony with priests and kings
10.
Giants (Greek mythology)
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According to Hesiod, the Giants were the offspring of Gaia, born from the blood that fell when Uranus was castrated by his Titan son Cronus. Archaic and Classical representations show Gigantes as man-sized hoplites fully human in form, later representations show Gigantes with snakes for legs. In later traditions, the Giants were often confused with other opponents of the Olympians, particularly the Titans, the vanquished Giants were said to be buried under volcanoes and to be the cause of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The name Gigantes is usually taken to imply earthborn, and Hesiods Theogony makes this explicit by having the Giants be the offspring of Gaia, According to Hesiod, Gaia mating with Uranus bore many children, the first generation of Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers. But Uranus hated his children and, as soon as they were born, he imprisoned them inside of Gaia, and so Gaia made a sickle of adamant which she gave to Cronus, the youngest of her Titan sons, and hid him to wait in ambush. And when Uranus came to lie with Gaia, Cronus castrated his father, and the drops that gushed forth received. From these same drops of blood also came the Erinyes and the Meliai, there are three brief mentions of Gigantes in Homers Odyssey, though its not entirely clear that Homer and Hesiod understood the term to mean the same thing. Elsewhere in the Odyssey, Alcinous says that the Phaiakians, like the Cyclopes, and Odysseus describes the Laestrygonians as more like Giants than men. Pausanias, the 2nd century AD geographer, read these lines of the Odyssey to mean that, for Homer, the 6th–5th century BC lyric poet Bacchylides calls the Giants sons of the Earth. Later the term became a common epithet of the Giants. Hyginus has the Giants being the offspring of Gaia and Tartarus, Homer describes the Giant king Eurymedon as great-hearted, and his people as insolent and froward. Hesiod calls the Giants strong and great which may or may not be a reference to their size, though a possible later addition, the Theogony also has the Giants born with gleaming armour, holding long spears in their hands. Other early sources characterize the Giants by their excesses, Pindar describes the excessive violence of the Giant Porphyrion as having provoked beyond all measure. Bacchylides calls the Giants arrogant, saying that they were destroyed by Hybris, Homers comparison of the Giants to the Laestrygonians is suggestive of similarities between the two races. Rocks huge as a man could lift, certainly possessed great strength, over time, descriptions of the Giants make them less human, more monstrous and more gigantic. According to Apollodorus the Giants had great size and strength, an appearance, with long hair and beards. Ovid makes them serpent-footed with a hundred arms, and Nonnus has them serpent-haired, the most important divine struggle in Greek mythology was the Gigantomachy, the battle fought between the Giants and the Olympian gods for supremacy of the cosmos. It is primarily for battle that the Giants are known
11.
Erechtheion
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The Erechtheion or Erechtheum is an ancient Greek temple on the north side of the Acropolis of Athens in Greece which was dedicated to both Athena and Poseidon. The temple as seen today was built between 421 and 406 BCE and its architect may have been Mnesicles, and it derived its name from a shrine dedicated to the legendary Greek hero Erichthonius. The sculptor and mason of the structure was Phidias, who was employed by Pericles to build both the Erechtheum and the Parthenon, some have suggested that it may have been built in honor of the legendary king Erechtheus, who is said to have been buried nearby. Erechtheus was mentioned in Homers Iliad as a king and ruler of Athens during the Archaic Period, and Erechtheus. It is believed to have been a replacement for the Peisistratid temple of Athena Polias destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC, the need to preserve multiple adjacent sacred precincts likely explains the complex design. The main structure consists of up to four compartments, the largest being the east cella, the entire temple is on a slope, so the west and north sides are about 3 m lower than the south and east sides. It was built entirely of marble from Mount Pentelikon, with friezes of black limestone from Eleusis which bore sculptures executed in relief in white marble. It had elaborately carved doorways and windows, and its columns were decorated, they were painted, gilded and highlighted with gilt bronze. The building is known for early examples of egg-and-dart, and guilloche ornamental moldings, the Theory of Mouldings, p22, J. H. Janson 1926, has detailed drawings of some of the decorations. On the north side, there is another large porch with six Ionic columns, and on the south, the famous Porch of the Maidens, with six draped female figures as supporting columns. An olive tree remains on the Western side of the Erechtheus, though it was planted there in modern times by Sophia of Prussia, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, in honour of the Athenians. In front of the statue, a golden lamp called asbestos lychnia made by the sculptor Callimachus burned continuously with its asbestos wick and was refuelled once a year. The eastern part of the building was dedicated to Athena Polias, while the western part served the cult of Poseidon-Erechtheus and held the altars of Hephaistus and Voutos, according to the myth, Athenas sacred snake lived there. The snake was fed honey-cakes by Canephorae, the priestesses of Athena Polias, by custom the women of the ancient family of Eteoboutadae, the snakes occasional refusal to eat the cakes was thought a disastrous omen. The Erechtheion underwent extensive repairs and reformation for the first time during the 1st century B. C. after its burning by the Roman general Sulla. The intact Erechtheum was extensively described by the Roman geographer Pausanias, the building was altered decisively during the early Byzantine period, when it was transformed into a church dedicated to the Theometor. With this alteration many architectural features of the ancient construction were lost and it became a palace under Frankish rule and the residence of the Turkish commanders harem in the Ottoman period. Athenian legend had it that at night the remaining five Caryatids could be heard wailing for their lost sister, Elgin attempted to remove a second Caryatid, when technical difficulties arose, he tried to have it sawn to pieces
12.
Culture of Greece
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In ancient times, Greece was the birthplace of Western culture and democracy. Modern democracies owe a debt to Greek beliefs in government by the people, trial by jury, the ancient Greeks pioneered in many fields that rely on systematic thought, including biology, geometry, history, philosophy, and physics. They introduced such important literary forms as epic and lyric poetry, history, tragedy, in their pursuit of order and proportion, the Greeks created an ideal of beauty that strongly influenced Western art. Ancient Greek architecture is best known through its temples and theatres, Byzantine architecture is the architecture of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine architecture emphasized a Greek cross layout, the Byzantine capitol style of column, during the Ottoman conquest, the Greek architecture was concentrated mainly on the Greek Orthodox churches of the Greek diaspora. These churches, such as other intellectual centres built by Greeks in Diaspora, was influenced by the western European architecture. After the independence of Greece and during the century, the Neoclassical architecture was heavily used for both public and private building. Regarding the churches, Greece also experienced the Neo-Byzantine revival, in 1933 the Athens Charter, a manifesto of the modernist movement, was signed, and was published later by Le Corbusier. Architects of this movement were among others, the Bauhaus-architect Ioannis Despotopoulos, Dimitris Pikionis, Patroklos Karantinos and Takis Zenetos. After World War II and the Greek civil war, the construction of condominiums in the major Greek city centres, was a major contributory factor for the Greek economy. The first skyscrapers were constructed during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the OTE Tower. During the 1960s and 1970s, Xenia was a hotel construction program initiated by the Hellenic Tourism Organisation to improve the countrys tourism infrastructure. It constitutes one of the largest infrastructure projects in modern Greek history, the first manager of the project was the architect Charalambos Sfaellos and from 1957 the buildings were designed by a team under Aris Konstantinidis. Cinema first appeared in Greece in 1896 but the first actual cine-theatre was opened in 1907, in 1914 the Asty Films Company was founded and the production of long films begun. Golfo, a well known traditional love story, is the first Greek long movie, in 1931, Orestis Laskos directed Daphnis and Chloe, contained the first nude scene in the history of European cinema, it was also the first Greek movie which was played abroad. In 1944 Katina Paxinou was honoured with the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for For Whom the Bell Tolls, the 1950s and early 1960s are considered by many as the Greek Golden age of Cinema. More than sixty films per year were made, with the majority having film noir elements, notable films were Η κάλπικη λίρα, Πικρό Ψωμί, O Drakos, Stella. Cacoyannis also directed Zorba the Greek with Anthony Quinn which received Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, finos Film also contributed to this period with movies such as Λατέρνα, Φτώχεια και Φιλότιμο, Η Θεία από το Σικάγο, Το ξύλο βγήκε από τον Παράδεισο and many more
