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Modern Description: The Portara is the most conspicuous and best-known Classical ruin on Naxos. It is the largest constructed monolithic doorway from the Archaic period in Greece, and is the only standing element remaining from a temple built around 530 BC under the period of rule of the tyrant Lygdamis, and subsequently left uncompleted. In its scale and ambition it expresses the prosperity, confidence and technical mastery of one of the most powerful centres in the Aegean at that time. Naxos had already begun to make its unmistakable mark on the pan-Ionian sanctuary of Apollo at Delos with impressive works of architecture and sculpture. Here, however, it was embellishing its own front door, marking the entrance to its harbour by what was to have been the grandest and most visible temple in the Cyclades. Lygdamis's building was raised on the site of Early Bronze Age structures, and there is evidence of human presence on the islet as far back as the 4th millennium BC.
Long thought to have been a sanctuary to Dionysos, patron divinity of the island, it is now generally thought to have been a temple to Delian Apollo, although this leaves unresolved problems relating to the unusual orientation of the building. It was once thought to have been designed as a porticoed temple in antis, with two Ionic porches to either end and with two rows of four columns dividing the interior space into three aisles. It is now generally believed that a much more ambitious and visually striking peripteral structure was intended, with a colonnade all around, which doubled on the short sides. Given the breadth (6m) and height (7.9m) of the existing doorway and its height off the ground, the much greater width of a peripteral design would have given the building more appropriate proportions.
In this hypothesis the temple would have had 12 columns on the long side and a double row of six on the short sides, bringing the overall area to c. 55 x 37m.
What is visible on the ground conforms well with a dipteral design. The two parallel lines of meticulously cut and interlocked blocks of foundations for the walls of the cella (measuring c. 37m x 15.5m by 12m high) are clearly visible. The outlines of the antae and the distyle pronaos beside the portal, and of the opisthodomos (also distyle) at the opposite end, are both discernible. The exquisite, crystalline quality of Naxiot marble and the fine finishing of the surface of the pieces with a bronze point can be noted in the blocks which are strewn over the area. One piece near the pathway in the south corner still bears the parallel scores from the drill and peg holes made when it was quarried from the rock-face. A great many of the blocks still possess the ‘knobs' on their surface, left uncut so as to provide a ‘handle' to help with block-and-tackle lifting and transporting: these are particularly evident in the monoliths of the portal, where they are of very large dimensions. These would have been removed and smoothed before completion.
The configuration of the site is made harder to read by the fact that an Early Christian church (removed in the 19th century) was created within the temple's cella in the 6th century AD. An entrance into it from the west was cut directly through the middle of the threshold block of the portal, leaving it thenceforward sundered in two. The church's floor level was therefore well below that of the threshold block. This fact also raises a series of unknowns. Was this floor level already in existence in the design of the temple? Probably yes, for two reasons: there would have been no point or motive for the Christian builders laboriously to dig out a lower level of floor if one had not already existed and if they could have used the floor of the existing cella of the temple. Second, the marble paving to the inside of the portal appears to be contemporaneous with the temple: it may, in fact, have belonged to a lower undercroft or treasury to the building (cp. the Archaic Temple of Hera on Samos), covered by a stone or wooden floor, c 1.90m above, at the level of the threshold. If this higher floor had deteriorated or collapsed, or had never even been finished, then the Early Christian builders would have had to use the lower level of floor and to cut a new entrance through the ancient threshold and its foundation courses.
Wikidata ID: Q2104990

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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