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Modern Description: Open 24 hours. A fifteen-minute walk from the upper east end of the town along an ancient paved kalderimi which circles the valley to the north—passing several springs, the cemetery with its dovecote, and a number of scattered antique remnants—leads to the site of the *Archaic ‘Lion of Ioulis', one of the largest and earliest pieces of monumental sculpture from the historic period in Greece. It is a remarkable and slightly inexplicable antiquity, which possesses little archaeological context and few points of comparison elsewhere. It is a boldly conceived image of a recumbent lion, about 6.4m long, carved from the living rock. Its style suggests a date between c. 620 and 580 BC. In later Antiquity, sculptures of lions often marked burials: for example, the celebrated lion guarding the grave of Leonidas at Thermopylae (now lost); or the still extant Hellenistic lion (of only slightly smaller size) at Krionerá, near Lavrion. Kea's would then be one of the earliest existing examples in Greece of lions used as funerary monuments. The piece appears to be cut substantially free of the rock-bed, and the sculpted part sits on a well-finished shelf of stone which is a part of the whole. Underneath it has been provisionally shored up with blocks to prevent its slipping. This cavity could originally have been a place of burial.
There is another alternative: the area is rich in springs and it is not impossible that the lion marked another, now dry spring which rose nearby, or even from under it. The reason for this choice of imagery would lie in the early mythology of the island, which related how the native spring-dwelling nymphs of Kea were frightened away from the island by a lion which descended from the mountains, and that their departure ushered in a period of prolonged drought. This climatic change was redressed much later by the intervention of Aristaeus, who created the altar to Zeus Ikmaios, the ‘rain bringer', on the highest point of the island, and through his solicitations of the Olympian god caused cooling breezes, vegetation and water to return to the island once again. A recumbent, resting lion was perhaps the best symbol of the animal's pacification and would have been an appropriate tutelary image for an important spring.
Wikidata ID: Q56417808
Trismegistos Geo: 54182

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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