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The temple
The tyrant Lygdamis began the temple to Apollo around 530 BC
Construction was started around 530 BC by the tyrant Lygdamis, whose building program included several public buildings on the island. The temple was of ionic order, 38 meters long and 16 meters wide, and it is oriented towards the sacred island of Delos.
Unfinished
It was never finished, because the tyrant fell around 524 BC
Construction stopped at the latest around 524 BC, when Lygdamis was removed from power by the Peloponnesian League, a military alliance led by Sparta. The bumps carved on the marble pieces to hold ropes would normally have been removed at the end of construction.
The door
The marble door frame has five pieces of up to 20 tons each
The main surviving feature is the large marble door frame. It consists of five marble pieces, originally four, weighing up to 20 tons each. The marble came from the quarry at Flerio, about 10 km away, and was lifted by wooden crane.
20 tonsthe greatest weight of each marble piece
Later uses
A church and a castle reused the temple, but the door stayed
In the 5th century AD a church dedicated to Saint Mary was built on the ruins, and a cut for its door is still visible in the threshold. In the Venetian period many parts of the temple were reused for the Castle of Naxos. The massive gate pieces stayed in place.
Day 1, morning
Next is Naxos Town.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Temple of Apollo (Naxos), and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.