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Modern Description: The extension of the road north from Myrina along Roméikos and Richá Nerá bays, crosses a small promontory and drops down to the estuarial bay of Avlónas – once the marshy and reedy harbour for what appears to have been a Sanctuary of Artemis (2.5 km) – worshipped here possibly as ‘Artemis Tauropolos', given the figurines of oxen and the skeleton of a sacrificial bull found at the site. The excavated remains of the sanctuary are somewhat improbably to be found right in the middle of a luxury hotel complex (Hotel Porto Myrina) surrounded by holiday villas. The site was only discovered and documented in the process of building the hotel.
A comprehensive view of the remaining visible area can had from the upper floor of the hotel's lobby, although there is no material to help the visitor understand the complex site: indeed its layout is still little understood by archaeologists. There are several construction phases: 1) a central core of 7th/6th century BC buildings (two overlying apsidal buildings with ancillary rooms); 2) a principally Hellenistic overlay of more rectangular spaces (perimeter walls, and rooms looking onto an open space in the centre of the precinct); and 3) small amounts of Roman construction at the southern extremity. A long rectangular room with stone benches at the northwest end of the inner enclosure may have functioned as an assembly room during initiation rituals. Door-posts and thresholds, and some large areas of paving of the open spaces are generally well-preserved. As elsewhere on the island, at Hephaistia and at the Sanctuary of the Cabeiri, the typology of the early sacred buildings here is not that of the standard Greek sanctuary organised around a temple and altar: it is of an oriental, pre-Greek model based on the telesterion-type of building, generally associated with Mystery cults.
Wikidata ID: Q38281170

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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