The architecture of the Aegean world

Conditions for the emergence and development of architecture in the Aegean world:

While mankind never forgot the Greek culture, the Aegean world was forgotten after its death and rediscovered at the end of the 19th century.

Geographic conditions. On the islands and the coast of the Aegean Sea in the 4th – 3rd millennium BC, a culture developed, it is commonly called the Aegean.

The Aegean world includes:

1) Crete Island;

2) Troy;

3) Mycenae and Tiryns;

4) Cyclades Islands.

Geographically, this is the part of modern Greece – Turkey. Though, in the Aegean period, these territories were inhabited by some peoples; in the Greek period – completely different.

This territory is located in a seismically active zone, therefore prevention of destruction during an earthquake and attempts to create seismic structures are important features of the architecture of the Aegean world.

Climatic conditions. The climate is mild Mediterranean. Winters are warm and humid. Hot summer.

Conditions for choosing materials. On this territory, there are timber and stones, which are the main building materials in the Aegean world. Brick was also used, including raw brick. Earthen solution was used as a binder. Lime mortar was used for plastering.

Religious conditions. Features of religious beliefs influenced the nature of architecture, in particular in Crete, it was predominantly secular.

Socio-historical conditions. In the mainland, where Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns were located, raids were not an exclusive phenomenon, so the architecture here was well fortified. At the same time, insular Crete was not burdened with this problem, so the need for fortification disappeared here. The states of the Aegean world were active in trade with other peoples and had a high level of culture.

The periods and main structures of the states of the Aegean world:

Trojan (ΙV – III millennium BC) – the city of Troy, megaron in Eleusis;

Mycenaean (XIV – XI c. BC) – “Treasury of Atreus”, the tomb of Clytemnestra, “Lion’s Gate”, the Acropolis of Tiryns;

Cretan (XVIII – XIV centuries BC) – the Palace of Knossos, the palace in Festus, the “Royal Villa” in Knossos.

Trojan architecture.

Features:

1. Huge Cyclopean defenses;
2. Among the main types of structures: megaron, fortifications, burial architecture. Their scale and materials of considerable strength contrasted with the character of the residential architecture.
3. The location of the entrances of defensive structures on different axes;
4. Organic.
5. The strict nature of architecture.

The location of Troy became known at the end of the 19th century, thanks to the excavations of G. Schliemann. Many settlements existed in the same place for many centuries, forming nine cultural layers.

Troy I

The first citadel emerged at the turn (IV-III millennium BC). Construction at this time was already carried out at a fairly high level.

Such a basic form of predominantly residential architecture as the megaron appears, which will be widespread in subsequent periods.

Megaron is an elongated rectangular room with a gable roof, two rooms along the longitudinal axis and an entrance portico at the end. Megaron had no windows, instead there was a hole in the ceiling between the support beams and the loggia at the entrance.

The walls consisted of rough stones bound with clay mortar.

Troy II existed in the 3rd millennium. It was a fortified city, with a citadel, towers, gates, powerful walls, inside which there was residential and religious architecture. The second settlement had several defensive walls that expanded to the bottom and were three meter high.

There was a wall inside the city, enclosing the citadel where the rulers lived. A colonnade passed by the inner wall of the citadel. The entrance to the citadel, propylon, had only one gate.

In the center, three megarons were densely located parallel to each other.

The middle megaron, measuring 10×20, was wider than the side ones. The raw walls were frame. The ceilings are flat, with internal wooden supports on stone foundations. The antes were also arranged.

The space between the inner wall and the outer walls was densely populated.

During the time of Troy III and Troy IV, the hill gradually expanded. The entrances were no longer built opposite each other, but were provided for a certain distance to complicate the defense system. The megaron remained the main architectural type. During this period, it became multi-nave. Wooden supports were replaced with stone ones. The stone was also used in the cladding. The absence of plaster did not contribute to the development of murals.

Therefore, the Trojan buildings, in comparison with other structures of the Aegean world, were distinguished by an emphasized severity.

The most famous building of that period is considered to be the two-necked megaron at Eleusis, which is the prototype of the early Greek temple.

The architecture of Troy in subsequent periods was not nearly as impressive.

Crete architecture.

Main periods:

1) Early Minoan – from 3000 to 2200 BC;

2) Middle Minoan – from 2200 to 1600 BC;

3) Pozneminoian – from 1600 to 1150 BC.

Features of Cretan architecture:

1. Unfortified cities;
2. Good inner and outer city improvement;
3. Creation of large palace complexes;
4. In the construction of the walls – a significant role of wood, which contributed to the seismic resistance of the structure;
5. The main structures were residential and public. The tombs were seldom emphatically architectural;
6. The premises were located at different heights, which was the result of adaptation to the relief and the solution of lighting problems;
7. Cretan religion dispensed with the worship of images of gods, and the ruler was not deified. Therefore, the existence of individual religious buildings is unknown. The premises for religious purposes were part of the palace;
8. The use of the Aegean order, “irrational columns”;
9. Application of seismic resistant designs.

Features of the Cretan palace:

1) A complex that combines premises of various functionality;

Unification of all rooms around a large courtyard, rectangular in plan and oriented to the north;

3) The length of the yard is always constant – 52 m.

4) The palace was not separated by a wall from the city buildings.

5) The Cretan palace is devoid of ostentatious presentability.

6) Priority was given not to the impression of the external monumental spectacular design of the structure, but to convenience and functionality.

7) Free open spaces pass into each other.

8) The openness and accessibility of the Cretan palace for citizens.

In the early Minoan period, round structures of stone or mud bricks with a conical roof were built in Crete. Later – houses with predominantly rectangular rooms, an example of which is the multi-family house in Vasiliki. Construction was carried out spontaneously. An order system was formed.

Aegean order:

The Aegean order consisted of a column and an entablature.

The column had three parts: base, fust and capital.

The base – at first it was conical, then – cylindrical, later – in the form of a disk with a barely noticeable protrusion.

Fust – expanded to the top.

The capital – strongly pronounced, consisted of echinus and a high square abacus, which had a significant extension.

The entablature consisted of three parts overhanging one another in steps. It was made of wooden beams and was very wide, due to the need to withstand significant loads.

The main material for the construction of the columns was wood. It works well for bending and torsion, which is very important in structures located in seismically active areas. A narrowed part of the column was installed in the hole in the stone base, which prevented it from falling out of there, creating a kind of spike structure.

With a horizontal push, the thin support of the column allowed it to make a free turn instead of breaking when rigidly fastened, and the wide abacus of the capital ensured horizontal movement of the ceiling without collapsing it.

The order was predominantly internal. The outer walls, especially the lower floors, were blank.

Middle Minoan, the stage of the “Old Palaces” (2200 – 18th centuries BC) – this is the early time of the Cretan culture.

Temple structures were not reduced, ritual premises were included in residential buildings. The houses occupied an insignificant area and grew in height, which is clearly evidenced by the faience tablets from Knossos – “the mosaic of the city”. The multi-tiered tower houses with flat roofs and windows facing the street were distinguished by clear horizontal and vertical divisions, some of them ended with mezzanines. The entrance to them was from the upper tier, where a staircase led. The lower floors were used as warehouses.

“The stage of new palaces” – the time of the highest flowering of Cretan architecture, when its stylistic features were fully formed, its basic principles crystallized.

The palace in Knossos occupied a large territory – more than 10 thousand square meters and consisted of several hundred rooms located in several tiers. The tiers were connected by corridors, staircases, ramps, galleries and loggias. The intricate plan of the palace gave rise to legends (it is considered the prototype of the mysterious Labyrinth from an ancient Greek myth).

In fact, the location of the premises, the grouping of volumes and the organization of the spatial environment were subject to clear principles. The core of the ensemble was a large, elongated courtyard. On the west side there were mainly ceremonial and religious premises, on the east – the “residential area”, which also included official halls. Warehouse and utility zones with workshops were moved to the periphery – along the western wall and in the northeastern corner. All rooms, halls and storerooms remained rectangular in plan and with flat ceilings. They were predominantly illuminated through courtyards of light, which were often combined with stairwells. The entrance loggia had a column in the middle and an open staircase that led to the ceremonial rooms located at the top.

Next to it was the famous “Throne Room”, illuminated from a small illuminated courtyard. The walls were decorated with friezes with sacred heraldic paintings. The throne was not on a dais, but simply on the floor. The entrance was located not along the axis of the hall, opposite the throne, but on the side.

The “Tsar’s Villa” in Knossos consists of two parts and has an L-shape. It has several entrances, chambers with skylights, sanctuaries, warehouses, storehouses, laboratories, stairs, courtyards, covered galleries. Several steps lead to the first floor.

The southern part is very simply designed. There are several rooms overlooking a simple corridor that could be used as auxiliary rooms. The chambers of the king were located in the western-eastern part. The floors were covered with mortar. The central room is connected through two doors to a courtyard with a well surrounded by columns.

On the western façade, a part of the staircase has survived; archaeologists called it the “staircase of the sea”. Warehouses are located in the north wing.

On the east side of the warehouse were luxurious chambers with several doors and skylights, as well as halls for rituals.

The walls are covered with stone plates and decorated with frescoes.

Late Minoan period. Between 1500 – 1450 BC. There was a colossal volcanic explosion on the island of Fera. Almost no new construction was carried out. The brilliant development of Cretan architecture ceased.

The architecture of Mycenae and Tiryns.

Features:

1. Fortification character;
2. Building tops of hills and rocks;
3. Construction of the acropolis;
4. Lack of strict composition in the planning of palaces;
5. Rethinking Cretan forms and borrowing Cretan stylistics.

Mycenae was located on mainland Greece near the sea coast on rocky hills. The Mycenaean culture dates back to the end of the 3rd millennium BC, when the Achaean tribes, penetrating there, mixed with the local population, creating a new cultural formation.

The architecture of Mycenae was also markedly fortified. The outer walls of the city, the thickness of which reached 10 m, and the height of 18 – 20 m, were built of huge roughly hewn stones. Set on the ridges of the rock, they seemed to be its continuation. Later, the ancient Greeks would call them cyclopean, because through the size of the boulders and the sweep of these walls it would seem to them that only giant cyclops could have built such a thing.

The main architecture that developed most intensively in Mycenae was fortification – it was strongly influenced by the Trojan traditions. When constructing civil buildings (tombs, palaces), the Mycenaeans turned to the experience of Cretan architects.

On a high hill was the acropolis – a fortified city, a sacred site where temples or palaces of rulers were built.

The Acropolis at Mycenae had fortified walls and several gates. In the center was a megaron-type palace with a courtyard.

“Lion’s Gate” is the central gate of the Mycenae fortress.

They are formed by two huge, vertically placed slabs, which are overlapped by a third slab. A hole was left in the masonry above it, overlapped by a slab with a relief: two lionesses are depicted in profile at the columns tapering downward.

The palace architecture also received a pronounced serfdom.

Residential architecture was built from raw bricks, with the use of a wooden frame, which increased the stability of the structure against earthquakes. There was a popular design, in which the bottom was laid out from large stone blocks, then a wooden frame was installed, which was filled with rubble stone or adobe masonry on a binder made of clay. With horizontal shocks, brickwork, rubble stone could play the role of an anti-seismic structure.

Mycenaean tombs:

1) Chamber – burial chambers (often serving the entire genus) with a short dromos.

2) Tholos – had hive-shaped false vaults and a long open dromos.

The most famous example of a thick tomb is the Treasury of Atreus.

It consisted of a stomy, dromos, tholos, and a burial chamber.

Stomy is the entrance to the gallery tomb. The stomy in the “Treasury of Atreus” was overlapped by two large blocks, the inner one of which was 120 tons. To avoid a collapse, an unloading triangle was arranged, it was formed by the overlap of the upper stones.

Dromos – a path or corridor leading to a burial chamber tomb or mound.

Tholos – in this building, it was used for burying gifts. The walls of the dome d = 14.6 m. It consisted of 33 rows of hewn stones, each of which protruded more and more and was more narrow than the previous one. The rows approached and the upper ring was covered with a slab at a height of 13.4 m.

The burial chamber is a room carved into the rock where the sarcophagus was kept. The walls were clad in alabaster, and the ceiling was decorated with carvings.

In the southeast of Mycenae was Tiryns, which was probably the defensive fortress protecting Mycenae.

The acropolis of Tiryns was dominated by clarity and symmetry in terms of composition.

Unlike Mycenae, the building of the citadel of Tiryns reflected the traditions of Troy. Large propylaea, which were porticoes in antae, with a ceremonial character, led to the first courtyard. From here, through the same propylaea, the entrance to the main courtyard was arranged, where the ritual altar was located, surrounded by a colonnade on three sides. It also housed the palace of the basileus – the Big Megaron. In Tiryns, the axial principle was not used – the axes of the propylae and the portico do not extend each other. In parallel, there was another courtyard, towards which two more megarons were turned.

The walls of the premises were painted white and red and were abundantly covered with ornamental paintings. The Mycenaean ornament is characterized by the use of floral motifs, a spiral motif. Stylistically, they are derived from Cretan. Thematic images were static, balanced, obeying the general architectural character.

The architecture of the Aegean world had a strong influence on the architectural traditions of Ancient Greece, as well as on the architecture and art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.