Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

In the ancient Greek world, one of the most sacred places was the sanctuary at Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. This was where the god Apollo and the nine Muses who inspired artists were supposed to live. It also had other older associations, and had been used as a place of worship from very ancient times, when snakes were considered to be divine. There was not a city here, but buildings accumulated, many of them gifts from the various city-states that made up the Greek federation. People came here from all over the Greek-speaking world in order to consult the oracle: an arcane procedure that involved a priestess inhaling the intoxicating fumes from burning laurel leaves, and uttering a flow of wailing sounds that would be turned into a neat but cryptic prophecy by the attendant priests. An extraordinary set of things was juxtaposed here. On the outside, set in breathtaking natural scenery, there were artistically accomplished buildings, fine statues, and the recreational buildings that belonged in sanctuaries — a stadium and a theatre. But at the core there was a religious mystery that involved the surrender of rationality to wild hallucination. The site was supposed to be the earth’s navel, the point at which its umbilical cord had long ago been attached, and therefore in some sense the centre of the world. An ancient carved stone remains, the omphalos, which stands up from the ground, tied off with sets of sculpted bandages, evidently in imitation of an earlier stone which would have had real bandages tied round it in solemn ceremonies. The place was special, and was a place of pilgrimage. This meant that by classical times, when the temple dedicated to Apollo was built, the priests at Delphi were unusually well informed about what was going on across the whole of the Greek-speaking world, and would therefore have been in a good position to give political advice. The superstitious practice of consulting the oracle would have been effective in part because the weird ululations were interpreted by people who were highly knowledgeable about current affairs. The buildings here, which include some very fine ones, had various functions — marking the centre of the Earth, housing the mysterious oracle, keeping secure the offerings brought by the various states (and the buildings themselves were offerings) as well as housing visitors and priests, and entertaining them with athletics and dramas.