Word: vravron
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...small Byzantine church on the site of ancient Vravron, 23 miles east of Athens, was in need of repair, and the task of supervising the job quite naturally fell to Archaeologist John Papadimitriou, director-general of Greece's Archaeological Services. As the work progressed, Papadimitriou began thinking about all the references to Vravron that he had read in the literature of ancient Greece. When he was finished with the church, he began to explore the grounds around. The result: an archaeological bonanza that since 1948 has brought to light 6,000 objects and statues, to make up what Papadimitriou...
Secret Stairs. The classical clues that Papadimitriou had to go on were as intriguing as they were vague. The historian Herodotus mentioned a temple of Artemis that flourished at Vravron. Aristophanes hinted at strange orgies. The rest was a tantalizing mixture of myths and the real civilization of the time. Euripides, in plays, described how Artemis rescued Iphigenia from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, and how later, at the behest of Athena, Iphigenia became Artemis' priestess at Vravron. She dwelt near some "holy stairs." and when she died, her grave was adorned "with braided gowns of softest weave...
Though popularly known as the goddess of the hunt, Artemis was worshiped at Vravron as a protector of maternity. From a still legible book of offerings, Papadimitriou and his team confirmed that pregnant women left rings at the temple to secure protection, and that those who died in pregnancy or childbirth bequeathed to the goddess their most precious possessions...
Years ago Dr. John Papadimitriou, director of antiquities in Greece's Ministry of Education, began collecting references to an ancient temple of Diana that apparently flourished for more than a thousand years near ancient Vravron, a fertile place on the east coast of Attica about 24 miles east of Athens. Herodotus mentioned the temple. So did Aristophanes, who hinted at orgies there. In Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris, the goddess Minerva tells Iphigenia and Orestes to take the statue of Diana that they had snatched from a temple in Tauris on the Black...
...Papadimitriou put together all his information from ancient sources and began to probe the ground at Vravron, now called Vraona, and inhabited by Albanian-speaking villagers, who grow tomatoes and cucumbers. Soon he found fragments of carved marble, which led him step by step toward the buried ruins of Diana's shrine. First to be found was the ceremonial "tomb" of Diana. Last June the overturned but well-preserved columns of the temple itself came to light. This month the diggers unearthed a magnificent stoa (portico) which can easily be restored. Many of the carved stones were in remarkably...
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