Temple of Aphrodite, Knidos

The Temple of Aphrodite Euploia was a sanctuary in ancient Knidos (Modern day Datça Turkey) dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. It was a famous pilgrimage, known for hosting the famous statue of Aphrodite of Knidos.

The sanctuary was dedicated to the goddess under her name Aphrodite Euploia or 'Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage', which was her name in her capacity of a sea goddess, an aspect very popular among sailors.[1]

It was a significant sanctuary, famous in the ancient world for hosting the first cult statue of the goddess depicted naked, which was sculptured by Praxiteles in 365 BC. As such, it became a place of pilgrimage, and continued to be so during the Roman Empire. It was a circular Doric temple surrounded with colonnades.[2] Unusually, the temple had doors also at the back, and the statue was not placed in the end of the hall of the temple's cella, but in the middle of the circular temple, making it possible for pilgrims to see the statue from all angles.[3] Around the temple, couches were placed among fragrant bushes, to make it possible for people to make love.[1] The famous temple was the role model for a copy erected at Emperor Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli.

Pausanias wrote:

The Knidians hold Aphrodite in very great honor, and they have sanctuaries of the goddess; the oldest is to her as Doritis (Bountiful ), the next in age as Akraia (Of the Height), while the newest is to the Aphrodite called Knidia by men generally, but Euploia (Fair Voyage) by the Knidians themselves.[4]

If still in use by the 4th-century, it would have been closed during the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire. The sanctuary was discovered in 1969 by Iris C. Love, who excavated the temple in 1970. At the site, Love found the marble base and fragments of the statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles.

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Archaeologist who discovered the Temple of Aphrodite

May 8, 2020

Iris Love, who has died aged 86 after being diagnosed with COVID-19, was a passionate archaeologist, her greatest contribution being her role in the discovery of the Temple of Aphrodite in 1969.

She arrived with her team of archaeologists in Knidos, at the tip of the Datca peninsula of south-western Turkey, in the summer of 1969 during a break from her work as a college teacher. They came in search of one of the most elusive sites in ancient history: a ruined sanctuary said to contain a statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, that dated back to the 5th century BC.

Archaeologist Iris Love in 2012.

This white marble artifact was so renowned in the classical world that the Roman historian Pliny, writing in the first century AD, had declared: "With this statue [the sculptor] Praxiteles made Knidos a famous city." Yet, like the ruins of the (perhaps mythical) Troy, it had long eluded archaeologists.

By 1967, when Iris Love was appointed research assistant professor of art history and archaeology at Long Island University, she was in a position to attempt a trip of her own. In preparation she had made a close study of Pliny's account, concluding that the sanctuary would have to be circular if it was to show off the statue from every angle.

A piece of serendipity led her to the peninsula. Sailing down the coast of Asia Minor with the Turkish archaeologist Askidil Akarca, Iris Love spotted a school of dolphins (animals sacred to Aphrodite) headed for the Bay of Knidos.

Taking this as a good omen, she obtained permission from the Turkish government to dig and spent the next three summers exploring the most promising site. This lay atop a rounded cliff overlooking the Aegean Sea.

On July 20 1969 – coincidentally the day of the moon landing – she had a breakthrough. Climbing to a high terrace in order to look at the site "as the crow flies", she spotted a circular "spill" that she recognized as the buried rubble that packed the foundations of the sanctuary itself. Her discovery made the front page of The New York Times.

It was verified, as she later put it, "for all eternity" in 1970, when a huge slab of marble with an inscription relating to Praxiteles's Aphrodite was found between some nearby walls.

Though only fragments of the famous statue have been uncovered – and Iris Love would later become involved in the debate as to whether or not some of these discoveries in fact belonged to the Knidos masterpiece – she confessed that she trusted in the divinity of the goddess to keep the site safe.

Despite admitting that the odds of success were "about one in 50 million", Iris Love continued to hope that the discovery of the Knidos Aphrodite's body might one day be hers to claim. To date, only Roman copies have been found.

Iris Cornelia Love was born on August 1, 1933 and grew up on Park Avenue in New York. Her father, Cornelius Love, was a stockbroker and diplomat. Her mother Audrey (née Josephthal) was a lifelong philanthropic volunteer (she had been president of the American Women's Voluntary Service in the Second World War) and a patron of the arts. The paternal side of the family owned a 75-acre farm in Goshen, Orange County, where the young Iris spent many happy hours hunting unsuccessfully for American Indian burial sites.

At first her education was shaped by an English governess, who passed on a love of Greek and Roman mythology. There were visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Iris always sought out the Roman peristyle and its collection of Etruscan terracotta warriors (these were later declared to be fakes). Iris then attended Brearley School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, followed by Madeira School in Virginia.

Mocked for her Jewishness, she nonetheless performed brilliantly in exams, and, having decided on her classical "destiny", majored in Art and Archaeology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After studying for her graduate degree in Archaeology at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, she went into teaching.

It was not long after her history-making find at Knidos that she began to build a reputation for outspokenness, being unafraid to criticise or exult her colleagues in public fashion. In November 1970 she caused a stir by claiming to have found the head of Praxiteles's Aphrodite statue tucked away in the depths of the British Museum – a claim that caused an uproar from the museum itself, not least because she had undermined them by going straight to The New York Times rather than wait for the head to go on display.

The resulting exhibition was short-lived and doubts soon grew as to whether it was a likeness of Aphrodite at all. A 1978 interview with The New Yorker found Iris Love unrepentant, proud of the work she had achieved and determined to carry on making discoveries. By 1981 she was lecturing on a new find, an "extremely rare, superior reproduction souvenir copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos" uncovered in Hartford, Connecticut.

During these years Iris Love's reputation as a socialite and amiable eccentric saw her establish a wide-ranging social circle. Andy Warhol wrote of her in his diaries; Mick and Bianca Jagger visited the dig in Knidos and Barbra Streisand asked for lessons on Agamemnon. "She told me it was interesting," she recalled of her famous pupil, "but preferred talking about herself."