TERRASSE DES LIONS
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5 statues of sitting lions installed by the Nacians, very photographed in Delos.
It is the most photographed of Delos: five statues of lions sitting on their hind legs, their front legs straight and their mouth open. They are between 1.64 and 1.80 m high and the most imposing is 3.21 m long from head to tail. They are certainly copies: the originals, threatened by the elements, have been relegated to the museum since 1999. Settled here by the Naxians at the end of the 7th century B.C., the lions of Delos were initially much more numerous: nine or even sixteen divided face to face in two rows over 50 m in length. The abandonment of the site and then the looters got the better of most of these Naxos marble felines. The survivors were unearthed by French archaeologists between 1886 and 1906. Their morphology is astonishing: manes with little mane and thin bodies. This is often attributed to the fact that the sculptors had never encountered lions. African lions, certainly, but what the artists of the archaic period represented here is the Panthera leo, the European lion, a finer animal that survived in continental Greece until the first century BC. However, realism is not the primary concern: the roughness of the features gives power to the lions that were supposed to impress visitors. Indeed, until the creation of the present port, it was through here that pilgrims passed on their way to the shrine of Apollo, arriving from the archaic port of Skardana Bay (200 m to the north), which was destroyed at the end of the 4th century BC.
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