Stymphalia

Stymphalia (Greek: Στυμφαλία, ancient Stymphalos) is a municipality in Corinthia, Greece. Population 2,852 (2001). The seat of the municipality is in Kalianoi, 41 km southwest of the town of Kiato on the Gulf of Corinth. The municipality occupies a mountain valley with an average altitude of 600 metres. Mount Kyllene dominates it to the north east, rising to ca. 2400 metres. The largest village is Lafka, but the principal antiquities are just south of the modern village of Stymphalia, a hamlet of ca. 100 inhabitants.

In ancient Greece, Stymphalos, lying in this valley of northwestern Arcadia, was renowned as the site of one of the labours of Heracles, the slaying of the Stymphalian birds. Hera, whose presence is never far from Heracles was venerated at the site in an archaic form in which she took three phases, as maiden, matron and even widow. [Pausanias vii.22.2.] Pindar mentions an Olympic victor (a man called Hagesias) in his sixth Olympian Ode , and urges the members of the choir to venerate their virginal Hera, who was apparently a survival of pre-Olympian religion. Little else is known from literature of Stymphalos in Antiquity. Artemis was the principal divinity of the town and her temple seems still to have been in use in Roman times. One unusual aspect of the goddess is that her sanctuary is referred to in an inscription of the early second c. BC as that of Brauronian Artemis, an Athenian cult. Demeter and Hermes are also epigraphically attested.

Anastasios Orlandos excavated parts of the site for the Archaeological Society of Athens between 1924 and 1930. Since 1982, excavations of the site on the north shore of Lake Stymphalia have been under way, directed by Hector Williams for the University of British Columbia. Archaeological surveys and excavations have revealed a town refounded in the fourth century BC. [The Bronze Age and early classical Stymphalos has not been precisely located.] the later city was laid out on a grid plan, with six-meter wide roads running north-south every thirty metres, which intersected major east-west avenues at intervals over a hundred metres. Houses have also been identified, and a theatre, a palaestra, a fountain house, several temples and the sanctuary, where an inscription preserving the letters POLIAD... ("of the city") found by Orlandos in 1925, but now lost, seems to indicate Athena Polias as the divinity worshipped, though no further confirmation has been found. In an annex to the temple several dozen loom weights suggest the further presence of Athena in a weaving workshop.

There are four early Christian cemeteries. Just to the north of the ancient city are the remains of the medieval Cistercian monastery of Zaraka, also partially excavated by the Canadian Institute. There are various other smaller sites scattered around the valley, but as yet there has been no systematic survey of them.

References

External links

* [http://www.cnrs.ubc.ca/index.php?id=3526 Stymphalos Excavations]
* [http://www.freewebs.com/pelopas - Kiato Greater Area]