Diana Was Here

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 Sea and set it up at Vravron.

Dr. 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 good condition because the floods of the River Erissinos (now dry) had covered them with silt.

Among the ruins Dr. Papadimitriou found many clues to the curious practices associated with the worship of the goddess. Though best known to the Greeks as the virgin huntress, she was from earliest times the patroness of pregnant women. Husbands made appropriate contributions, and Diana's priestesses inherited the jewelry, clothing and other possessions of women who died in childbirth. Many of these offerings were found in the silty soil of Vraona.

Diana's worship at Vraona had a special feature: little girls dressed as bears. According to an ancient legend, a couple of Athenian juvenile delinquents killed Diana's holy bear, and she sent a pestilence to punish their city. To square themselves with Diana, the citizens agreed to send five-to ten-year-old girls of noble families to Vraona to substitute for the murdered bear. No one seems to know whether these noble nymphets took part in the orgies mentioned by Aristophanes. Dr. Papadimitriou doubts it. They appear to have been housed, and perhaps chaperoned, in a sort of dormitory. In Diana's stoa. he found the stone bases of beds that he thinks were the very ones used by Diana's "bears."

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