In the Sanctuary of the Great Gods
By Bonna D. Wescoat

As an archaeologist, I am inevitably asked, "Have you found anything exciting?" But "exciting" is always relative. Finding the palm of a marble hand might not sound like much, but when that hand belongs to the great Winged Victory of Samothrace, it is very exciting! The story of its discovery by my mentor Phyllis Williams Lehmann – and of her subsequent search for the fingers in Vienna's war-torn Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the reunion of the hand with its owner in the Louvre – exerted a powerful magnetic force on me. I went to Samothrace during my first summer in graduate school, unaware that 30 years later, I would be returning, now with my own graduate students.

Samothrace – a great, wind-swept rock rising like a beacon from the northern Aegean Sea – forms a touchstone between the Dardanelles and plains of Troy to the east and holy Mt. Athos to the west. According to Greek myth, Dardanos left Samothrace to found the Trojan race. Kadmos of Phoenicia came to Samothrace in search of his sister Europa, but instead found Harmonia. At their wedding, Harmonia's brother Eetion seduced the earth goddess Demeter, bringing forth Plutos (wealth), but for his transgression, Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt. Later stories treat Eetion more kindly: Zeus instead instructs him in the mysteries that became the island's most sacred rites.

Rooted in journey, these stories serve as a fitting mythological backdrop to the real voyage that pilgrims later made to the Sanctuary at Samothrace to be initiated into the mystery cult of the Megaloi Theoi, the Great Gods. We have only a shadowy notion of who these pre-Greek Great Gods were, but the Sanctuary has the unmistakable aura of sacred ground. Facing the sea and set in a cleft at the base of a mountain, it feels spiritually integrated with the divine forces of earth, sea, and sky, which played a vital role in the mysteria.

Initiation took place only on Samothrace, but initiates established gathering places called Samothrakeia around the eastern Mediterranean and into the Black Sea littoral – something like an ancient network of Masonic Lodges. Membership had its privileges. Not only did it afford special protection at sea and in times of peril, but initiates also became "both more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before," according to Diodorus.

What happened during the initiation was to remain secret, and the ancients generally kept their promise. Our best opportunity to understand the cult, its participants, and the significance of the Sanctuary is therefore through archaeology. In 1444, Cyriacus of Ancona became the first scholar to visit Samothrace and record its antiquities. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, teams of French, Austrian, and Czech archaeologists excavated the site, and since 1938, American archaeologists have worked there. Over the last 70 years, most of the area within the Sanctuary has been excavated. Our team, under Director James McCredie, is now engaged in an intensive program of interpretation and publication.

The project I lead concerns the complex of buildings and monuments that make up the first major gathering place within the Sanctuary. Although the ancient texts are mute, the configuration of architecture and topography speaks volumes. Here, prospective initiates from across the Mediterranean were forged into community as they prepared to enter the heart of the Sanctuary. In its prime, the area's sunken orchestra was framed by tiers of grandstands and dozens of bronze statues that engaged the approaching pilgrim and bore permanent witness to the actions performed in the space. The entire complex was dominated by a splendid Doric edifice, the only material achievement of the blood successors to Alexander the Great (his half-brother Philip III and his son Alexander IV).

For me, an architectural historian, Samothrace is a treasure trove of splendidly innovative buildings donated by Hellenistic royalty, both for piety and politics. In Greek stone architecture, every part has its place; the science of putting the buildings back together, either on paper or in reconstruction, involves tracing the ancient masons' work, block by block. Many Greek buildings are predictable, but at Samothrace we specialize in the unpredictable, both in design and function, which makes for more interesting and more challenging research.

Work at the Sanctuary has made Emory a familiar name in the northern Aegean. Art History graduate students from Emory – along with students from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and Harvard's Graduate School of Design – form the backbone of our team. Emory graduate students Jennifer Palinkas, Amy Sowder, Susan Blevins, Anthony Mangieri, A. Christy Balthis, and Rachel Foulk have taken on the diverse range of projects that fieldwork demands. Carlos Museum Curator Jasper Gaunt is completing the catalog of bronze finds from the Eastern Hill, and Classics professor Sandra Blakely has studied the Kabeiroi and explored the Samothracian cult in the larger context of the Mediterranean. Funds from the Institute for Comparative and International Studies have supported crucial aspects of the work. We work in close collaboration with our Greek colleague responsible for the island, archaeologist Dimitris Matsas.

As we wrap up work on the Eastern Hill, we are already turning to our next major project, on celebratory dining within the Sanctuary. At Samothrace, the debris of holy feasting and drinking remains both the earliest and the latest evidence we have for the practices of the cult. Among the several splendid dining facilities, one in particular captures the imagination – a grand marble edifice with Ionic columns, flanked by dining wings in the manner of the fanciest dining rooms in the Macedonian palace at Vergina. This building, however, was given not by royalty, but by a private woman from the city of Miletos, in modern Turkey. Women were known to be patrons of architectural projects, but not this early and not this far from home. We aim to learn more about the Milesian Lady and her extraordinary gift. Each summer we return to the island, certain in the possibility that we just may be the ones to find the head of the Winged Victory.

---

Bonna D. Wescoat is an associate professor in Emory's Art History Department and Adjunct Associate Professor of Fine Arts, Excavations in Samothrace, at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. She currently serves as Whitehead Visiting Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and will return to Emory in the fall.