Terrace of the Lions
Row of snarling archaic marble lions guarding a sacred lake, replicas of a seventh-century offering by Naxos.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Terrace of the Lions on Mykonos starts with an absence: an eighth lion missing from the row still crouched on this ridge, stolen and shipped off to guard a gate in Venice. It traces the row back to around six hundred BC, when Naxos, then the richest island in the Aegean, carved these marble sentries to guard the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis by the Sacred Lake below. You'll hear how the lions held their post for more than two thousand years before a Venetian admiral at war with the Ottomans took one during a sixteen-eighties campaign through the Aegean, and where it ended up. Stand facing the lake to see where the missing lion once stood in the line.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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