Granaries, Treasuries, and the Doric Temple

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-420-4_12How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Greek Temple; Doric Frieze; Vitruvius; Triglyph; Granaries

Abstract

One of the twentieth century theories about the Doric temple of ancient Greece with colonnades all around claims that it represents the image of a communal granary in memory of the agricultural origins of Greek society. This theory was refuted by the specialists dealing with ancient Greek architecture, but this paper discusses partly new material and presents an argument that can support it. First it is shown that the core structure of Doric temples (without the outer colonnades) was so similar to Doric treasure houses that it could have been developed from them by providing more space for storing and exhibiting votive offerings and treasures. Then a case from the Iberian Peninsula is discussed where elements resembling Doric triglyphs are provided with ventilation slits and used with granaries that belong to an old tradition that may go back to prehistoric origins in central or northern Europe. This unique ethnographic parallel and its historical circumstances strongly suggest that the usually neglected alternative ancient theory mentioned by Vitruvius, which said that the triglyphs are ‘images of windows’, was intended to refer to ventilation slits that were provided in the studs of half-timbered walls of granaries. This ancient theory therefore supports the interpretation that the Doric frieze represents the wall of a granary, while the outer form of the temple can be seen as the monumental image of a granary of a large community.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Gaudenz Domenig
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/06/26
TI  - Granaries, Treasuries, and the Doric Temple
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Religious Architecture (ICRA 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 160
EP  - 170
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-420-4_12
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-420-4_12
ID  - Domenig2025
ER  -