Aphaia, the temple above the gulf

Aphaia was a goddess known almost nowhere but here. Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, tells the Cretan version of her story: a young huntress called Britomartis fled from King Minos, threw herself into the sea, was caught in fishermen's nets and was made a goddess by Artemis, worshipped on Crete as Diktynna and on Aegina as Aphaia, a name often read as 'the one who vanished'. The finds from the hill suggest that some female deity was honoured here long before the temple, in the Bronze Age.

The temple you see is the second on the spot. An earlier one, from about 570 BC, burned around 510 BC, and its painted pieces were buried in the terrace of the new building, which is why they came out of the ground in 1969 with their colours still bright. The new temple was built of local limestone, once covered in fine stucco, with a marble roof and two pediments full of marble warriors: the Trojan War on the west front, an earlier war against Troy, led by Heracles, on the east, with Athena standing in the middle of each.

Those warriors are not here. In 1811 a group of young European travellers, among them the English architect Charles Robert Cockerell, dug out the fallen sculptures and shipped them off the island. They were sold to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, restored in Rome by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and have stood in the Glyptothek in Munich ever since. Copies, and some original fragments, are on the island.

People like to say that Aphaia, the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion form a perfect 'sacred triangle' across the water. It is a lovely legend, but the three were built at different times for different gods, and the geometry is approximate at best. What is true is the view: stand on the east side of the terrace on a clear morning and the hill of the Acropolis appears across the gulf.