The Heraion of Samos

Hera is born beneath a tree

The Heraion of Samos was the sanctuary of the goddess Hera on the island of Samos. A sanctuary is a sacred place set apart for a god. This one stood on low ground beside the river Imbrasos.

Its story begins under a tree. The ancient travel writer Pausanias records that the people of Samos believed Hera was born on their island. She was born beside the Imbrasos, beneath a willow. In the second century AD that willow still grew in the sanctuary.

The tree is often identified today as a chaste tree, and local tradition said the wooden cult image of Hera, the statue that was worshipped, was found beneath it. Ancient plant names do not match modern ones neatly. But either way the pattern is the same: the tree, the river and the goddess belonged together before any great temple stood on the ground.

This birth story gives the sanctuary a subject of its own. The Heraion was more than a large building for one of the Olympian gods. Samos placed Hera’s first appearance on this riverbank, and the temples grew up around a place already claimed as her birthplace.

The first temples around the altar

The building history began early. A temple of the eighth century BC stood one hundred feet long. It is known as the Hecatompedos, and it was the first Greek temple to reach that length.

The temple that followed it, in the seventh century BC, added a double row of columns across the front. Each rebuilding made the way in more formal. Each kept the sanctuary centred on the altar of Hera, where offerings were made to her.

The temple of Rhoecus and Theodorus

Around 570 BC, the builders Rhoecus and Theodorus began laying out a much larger temple. It was wider than many modern streets are long. Two rows of columns surrounded the room of the goddess, and at least one hundred supports carried the roof.

It measured 52.5 by 105 metres. It was the earliest great building in the Ionic style, one of the main styles of Greek architecture. The shaped bases of its columns were turned on a lathe that Theodorus devised. The building made the sanctuary a test of scale as well as a place of worship.

The temple too large to finish

The temple of Rhoecus and Theodorus did not last. It began to fail soon after it was finished. In the 520s BC, during the rule of Polycrates, builders began a still larger replacement. It was planned with 155 columns about 20 metres high, and with a length of more than 108 metres. Its outer colonnade, the ring of columns around the outside, was never completed.

So the Samians kept enlarging a sanctuary whose sacred centre was older and simpler than any of its buildings. The site holds a series of projects, each laid over earlier sacred ground.

The historian Herodotus saw the temple as a claim for the whole city. He lists the three greatest works made by Greeks, and all three are on Samos: the tunnel of Eupalinos, the harbour wall and the temple. He calls the temple the largest he knew. He says little of Hera’s birth beneath the tree. His subject is what the islanders built.

What the ruins preserve

The ruins hold two great sixth-century buildings, and modern study keeps them apart. Dipteros I, the temple linked with Rhoecus, soon became unstable. Dipteros II, begun under Polycrates, is the ruin that stands over the site now. Its outermost ring of columns was never finished.

That unfinished ring means the Heraion cannot be reduced to one famous design. The sanctuary records decision after decision to rebuild. There was an early temple one hundred feet long, a new arrangement of columns, a huge Ionic experiment and an even larger successor. Beneath all of them lies the older Samian reason the ground was sacred. Hera was born beside the Imbrasos, under the tree that the sanctuary kept within its bounds.