BRAURON
(Vraona) Attica, Greece.
Lies
beside a small bay on the E coast, about 38 km from
Athens.
A fortified prehistoric settlement occupied the small
hill about 400 m W of the bay, flourishing from the
Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, but particularly during the period ca. 2000-1600 B.C. A few houses have been
cleared, and on the NW slopes of the hill E of the
acropolis, several Late Helladic chamber tombs were
dug. This settlement was abandoned before the end of
the Bronze Age, and in the Classical period only a
sanctuary remained. It lay just to the NW of the acropolis and was active from the late 8th to the 3d c. B.C.,
when it was destroyed by a flood of the nearby river
Erasinos. The area was deserted in Roman times, but in
the 6th c. A.D. an Early Christian basilica was built
about 500 m W of the sanctuary on the other side of
the valley, and reused some material from the sanctuary
itself.
The goddess of the sanctuary, identified with Artemis,
was particularly connected with childbirth and was worshiped mainly by women. Her cult statue, presumably a
primitive one, was said to have been brought from the
Crimea by Iphigeneia and Orestes (Eur.
IT 1462-67)
but Pausanias (
1.23.7; 1.33.1; 3.16.8) discounts the
story. Iphigeneia herself was supposed to be buried
there. The special servants of Artemis Brauronia were
called arktoi (bears), young girls aged between five
and ten, who wore saffron robes, perhaps to recall the
actual bearskins of an earlier period (
Suda, s.v.
῎αρκτος ῍η Βραυρωνίοις).
Greek excavations between 1948 and 1962 revealed the
main buildings of the sanctuary. Of the temple, dating
from ca. 500 B.C., only the foundations remain. It was
a small Doric building (ca. 20 x 11 m), but little is
known of its plan. Immediately to the NW of the temple
terrace is a copious spring into whose waters offerings
were thrown. From the partly artificial basin of the
spring, and from the bed of the stream flowing N from
it, many dedications were recovered, mostly of a feminine character—mirrors rings, gems, etc.; particularly
valuable are the objects of bone and wood which luckily
have been preserved in the mud. The spring seems to have
been the most sacred part of the sanctuary until the late
6th c. B.C., but both it and the temple were probably
destroyed by the Persians in 480.
About 10 m SE of the temple, in a cleft in the rock
which was probably once a cave, stood a small temple-like building which perhaps represents the supposed
Tomb of Iphigeneia. It seems to have replaced the earlier buildings to the SE, which were destroyed by the
collapse of the cave roof in the mid 5th c. B.C.
The most impressive building at the sanctuary is the
large Doric stoa dating from ca. 430-420 B.C., which was
perhaps used by the arktoi. It was to have had three
colonnaded wings facing onto a court from the W, N, and
E, the temple terrace forming the fourth side. The E wing
was longer than the W, and did not have rooms behind
its portico as did the N and W wings. In the end,
the N wing alone was completed; except for the column
nearest the corner with the N colonnade, the E and W
colonnades never rose above their foundations. Behind
the N wing was a narrow courtyard with a small propylon at each end, and a shallow portico forming its N side.
The N colonnade of the stoa has been partially restored, using the original elements found lying in front
of it. Its 11 Doric columns, with shafts of local sandstone and capitals of Pentelic marble, stood on a marble
stylobate, which, although it has settled badly at the E
end, seems to have been laid in a rising curve like that
of the Parthenon. The columns were more widely spaced
than in contemporary temples, so that above each span
there are three metopes instead of two; the spans nearest
the corners were extended a further 12 cm to allow a
half-triglyph to appear in the frieze at the reentrant
angle. The stoa is one of the earliest buildings where
this wider column spacing is found, and where the
problem of the reentrant angle had to be met; not
surprisingly, therefore, the adjustment of the column
spacing is not really adequate.
Behind the N and (intended) W porticos of the stoa
were various rooms, the majority of them of a standard
size (ca. 6 x 6 m) and equipped with 11 couches and 7
small tables. The arrangement of these rooms is best
seen at the E end of the N wing, where the base blocks
for several tables, as well as the holes where couch legs
were fixed with lead, still survive. The rooms were entered from the porticos in front of them, and in the
marble threshold of the first room from the E can be
seen one of the bronze pivots for the double doors and
the prism-shaped bronze projections that held the doors
shut.
Besides the standard rooms, there were also in the N
wing a narrow passage to the N court, and a small room
at the extreme W end, which probably served as a lodge
for the porter of the W gate into the N court. In the W
wing, the third room from the S formed the main entrance to the stoa and its court from the W. The many
wheel-marks visible here, however, belong with a rough
road made of reused reliefs and architectural members
and laid over the remains of the stoa, probably by
people coming to remove building material from the
site.
Along the central wall of the N wing, behind the rear
wall of the W wing, and at the foot of the N retaining
wall of the temple, there were rows of bases. On most
of these bases were reliefs or inscriptions in honor of
Artemis, but there were also several statues of children,
mostly girls (arktoi ?), dating from the 5th and 4th c.
B.C. Several fragments of the catalogue of dedications
to Artemis list separately the garments dedicated to the
goddess, either in thanks for successful childbirth or in
memory of those who died as a result of it. The garments were perhaps displayed on the racks which appear
to have occupied the narrow portico of the N court.
About 7 m W of the stoa, a bridge of the 5th c. B.C.
crosses the stream which flows N from the sacred spring
to the Erasinos. It is ca. 9 m long x 9 m wide, very simple in structure, and consists of horizontal slabs about
1 m long which rest on five rows of upright slabs. Not
all the buildings at the sanctuary have been uncovered;
an inscription mentions several others, including a palaistra and a gymnasium.
The finds from the excavations at the artemision are
mostly housed in a new museum on the site.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
B. Stais,
ArchEph (1895) 196-99; J.
Papadimitriou in
Praktika (1945-48) 81-90; (1949) 75-90; (1950) 173-87; (1955) 118-20; (1956) 73-87; (1957)
42-45; (1959) 18-20; in
Ergon (1956) 25-31; (1957)
20-24; (1958) 30-39; (1959) 13-20; (1960) 21-30;
(1961) 20-37; (1962) 25-39; “The Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron,”
Scientific American (June 1963) 111-20
MP; Ch. Bouras,
I Anastilosis tis Stoas tis Vravronos
(1967)
MP.
Hdt. 6.138; Eur.
IT 1462-67;
Strab. 9.1.22;
Suda, s.v.
῎αρκτος ῍η Βραυρωνίοις J. J. COULTON