Tur audio Temple E

Upon entering in the Archaeological Park of Selinunte the first image that will surely catch our attention is that of the temple E that with its grandeur overlooks the Eastern Hill of the old town. It is the only one that was rebuilt among all the temples of this area.

This magnificent building has been identified as the Temple of Hera.

Do you know who was this goddess? The wife of Zeus, the father of the gods, and she is the goddess-bride par excellence and, for this, was the goddess of marriage, family and loyalty. In fact, she was adored by the young brides and wives, as she would guarantee them a happy marriage and fidelity of husbands... just Hera was often forced to come to terms with the constant infidelities of her spouse!

But let's try to get together in her temple .From the main façade facing East consisting of six columns, you may enter in the temple by climbing 10 steps, of which the last three are part of the base, called crepidoma, on which the temple was built.

To access inside a temple, first you may cross the Pronaos, a space that preceded the nàos, the cell, which is the most sacred part of a temple, where the statue of the deity was exposed.

Observe carefully: the cell walls and part of the original flooring are still visible.

Climbing up further another few steps you enter in the adyton that, inside the cell, was instead the most secret part of the temple, where the most sacred objects connected with the cult were kept.

Do you know that only the priests could enter here?

All around, the cell was decorated by a circuit of columns, the peristasis: 6 on the short sides and 15 on the long ones. The columns were almost 10 m high! If you try to observe them, you will see that they were not monolithic, that is formed by a single cylinder, but consisted of six large stone disks, the “rocchi”. And their surface was not smooth, but it was decorated with grooves: try to count them, they are 20!

The temple was not bare stone, but it was all plastered and painted! Some columns of the north side, for example ,conserve still part of the old white plaster that covered them.

On the West side, opposite the pronaos, there is a closed compartment with two columns at the entrance: this is the opisthodomos, which was the room in which the temple Treasury was stored, it consisted of all offers that the believers would bring as a gift to the gods.

The 5 metopes were from the Pronaos and the opisthodomos: they decorated the frieze, which was formed by these sculptured slabs, alternated with other slabs, which were decorated by carved vertical bands, the triglyphs.

In this case, you have to imagine these slabs painted: in red the metopes and in blue the triglyphs. The three metopes found in the Pronaos are: Hercules and the Amazon, Zeus and Hera, Artemis and Actaeon, while those coming from the opisthodomos are two and are a bit more ruined; they represent Athena and Enceladus and Apollo and Daphne.

Now let’s find out what these works have to tell us!

This text has been translated by Anna Gullo with the collaboration of Angela Gisone. The narrator is Andrea Todisco: class V C from the Primary School "Lombardo Radice".