Didim's Apollon: a Walk among the Ruins
The Temple of Apollo is just one hectare in size, but the grounds are packed with artifacts and symbols that will enlighten your visit and bring 2,300 years of history to life.
The Apollon in Didim.
It is one of the most remarkable ancient sites in western Turkey (I wrote about the history of the temple last week). I have led tours there four times now, and I swear the loudest “oh wow!” I hear, standing at the base of those soaring, 19.7-meter-high ionic columns is still mine.
When I got a chance to return last month, I brought my notebook and did my research. It was not a time to gape in wonder; it was a time to figure things out — and share them with you, dear reader.
In this post, I will take a walk around the exterior of the temple and describe the artwork and the symbols that I find.
The Head of Medusa
At the base of the stairs leading down from the entrance are two monumental heads of Medusa, amazing Byzantine-era carvings of cherub-cheeked gorgons. The eyebrows are knitted together in a mix of anger and worry.
The heads came from frieze of the temple, a high row of blocks between the architrave layer at the tops of the column capitals and the base of the roof or cornice. The Apollon had a lot of Medusa carvings around the outside of the temple, about one every five meters or so.
In mythology, Medusa was associated with the goddess, Athena, who had cursed the gorgon and changed her hair into serpents for the crime of, well, being raped by Poseidon within one of Athena’s temples1. Athena had acquired Medusa’s head — which had the power to turn anyone who looked at her into stone — from the hero, Perseus, and installed it on her aegis or body armor.
So what is this head doing on a temple of Apollo? First, I should point out that this was a common feature of Roman art. Similar meter-high carvings of the gorgon can be found in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum and at the base of the pillars in the amazing Basilica Cistern.
Their function was probably apotropaic — a way of scaring away evil spirits from the building. In the same way that gargoyles jutted out from medieval cathedrals to keep demons at bay, these medusas kept the temple safe.
Whether any actual demons were scared away will never be known. But the heads also had an impact on people who approached the temple. The sight of Medusa inspired the fear of god, “petrifying” the onlooker.
The temple was an awesome site. The Medusa heads below the roof made it a fearsome one, too.
Persian and Astrological Signs
Instead of going straight to the temple, I worked my way around the hill clockwise, looking among the rubble there for clues about the temple’s past.
I found an amazing capitol with bulls’ heads on two corners and lions’ heads on the others. It was worth its own post about the astrological signs of spring, which I wrote last week
Ancient Angel or goddess?
Just beyond the capital of lions & bulls lies an angel, ready to lift herself off the heavy stone with her wings. Arms outstretched. She could be bearing good news to shepherds, or relaying a heavenly message to the oracle or priest of the place.
While the Apollon became a Christian church, it is too early in the tour for Christian evidence. I really like Shannon Wood’s assertion that this is the goddess, Nike, on the frieze piece.
Notice her wings but also the laurel wreath, still evident in her right hand — chipped off, perhaps, by a devout Christian during the building’s 1000 years as a basilica — the Christian emperor, Theodosius, had banned the Olympic Games in 393. Her legs turn into horns of plenty: a sign of good fortune, antithesis to neighboring gorgon heads.
Clearly the blessings of the god shared the frieze of the temple with the curses of Medusa.
As you move around towards the eastern entrance of the temple, a plaque shows this image of the completed temple.
Note the frieze along row k where the medusa heads lie. But more importantly count the number of columns on the front row of the temple. There are ten, making this a rare, enormous decastyle temple, one of only two in the greek world: the other (we think) was on Samos.
Moving around the top of the hill towards the south side of the temple, more Medusa heads are lined up along the edge of the property. It is time to go down to the south-facing steps and see what we can find there.
Are these Christian artifacts?
Here’s the thing about archaeology: you’ve gotta dig.
Judging by the road that runs along the east side of the temple site, the steps lie more than 3 meters below the natural surface of the ground.
No doubt the archaeologists dug through centuries of artifacts until they found the stones of the Greco-Roman temple we see today and carefully catalogued and restored them to their current state.
Among the layers above the Greco-Roman temple we see today was evidence of 1,000 years of Christian worship from 480 to 1453 CE. Perhaps it didn’t fit — this is for another, future investigation on my part. But if you look you can find evidence on the grounds if not in the temple proper.
(And here’s another thing about archaeology: at some point you’ve gotta stop digging. No doubt beneath that enormouse foundation is evidence of the archaic temple of Croesus — and maybe more primitive sites of worship below that.)
Since archaeology began as a science in the West, archeologists tend to stop at the layers that connect to Western culture, and those layers are Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome. I love that, but I know there are thousands more years of human history on this site that visitors will never see.
Lying in the grass I find two pillars and the capital of a column smaller than the ones around the exterior of the temple. All of them have crosses.
Maybe my eyes deceived me. The cross in the middle had cracks where the arms would be. Still, it clearly resembled other carved crosses I have seen here. The cross-capital on the right reminded me of capitals I had seen in Aphrodesias, where an ancient temple of Aphrodite had been repurposed as a Christian church.
Prime Seats on the South Side
As I climbed the steps of the south side of the temple, I saw Greek letters scrawled into the edges.
These names provided hints of the dual use of the south steps. At one time, a stadium lay here, used for quadrennial competitions known as the Didymeia Commodeia. Those seated on the south steps watched plays and music concerts as well as athletic events, with prizes going to all winners.
If it weren’t for the marked steps, one wouldn’t imagine a stadium here. The wall at the southern border of the site cuts the field in half. Still, I can imagine thousands of onlookers making the trip out from Miletus and other cities in the area to cheer on their cities’ representatives in the various competitions.
A walk around the western side shows more rubble, including several toppled columns, just waiting to be stacked up again. As someone who really loves to see restored ancient sites, I feel like a good clean up would result in about ten more columns and a nice section of roof!
My walk around the outside ends at the eastern steps of the temple that lead to the entrance. There are more designs here, etched into the stone, as well as wonderful symbols, but these will be for another blog.
Looking eastward from the steps, up past the street and the souvenir shops on the other side, there is a mosque, still bearing the signs of the Greek Orthodox church that it once was. Didyma means “twins,” and Apollo had a twin named Artemis, for whom a temple was often built along with his. That church marks the site of her temple, overlooking the “Sacred Way” between Miletus and the Apollon of Didyma.
This is a good place to end for now. A third tour will appear in this space soon, going inside the temple and looking at the inscriptions one can still find there.
Natalie Haynes’s book, Stone Blind, tells a sympathetic tale of Medusa and all her suffering before her head was severed and used to petrify sea monsters and lascivious kings.