A view of the citadel west walls rising to front and left
Tiryns lies at the southern end of the plain of Argos, just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the beautiful town of Nafplio, one of the most popular destinations for travelers both foreign and Greek. In this part of Greece one is immediately surrounded by an unusual wealth of Bronze Age remains, and especially Mycenaean citadels. The most famous is undoubtedly Mycenae, which in modern times gave its name to the entire culture of the Late Bronze Age in Greece, a culture that developed, thrived and collapsed in the second half of the second millennium BCE.
View of the site of Tiryns and the Argive Plain
Although it is located in the shadow of mighty Mycenae, Tiryns was always famous for its great walls which were celebrated even in antiquity by so many poets and travellers. Homer speaks of “wall-girt Tiryns”, while Pausanias considers them to be no less deserving of respect than the pyramids of Egypt. Encompassing an area of about 5 acres, the walls run 725m around a long, low and rocky height that rises like an island out of the plain. They stand directly on the bedrock and were built of huge blocks of locally-quarried red and grey limestone, in a technique that made the Classical Greeks, a thousand years later, think that they must have been built by giants, not humans, and namely by the giant one-eyed Cyclops. We therefore even today call this walling style, defined by large and partially-hewn blocks, “Cyclopean”.
Large, partly-hewn bastion Walls
In 1876, these walls caught the eye of Heinrich Scheimann who correctly recognized them to be ‘prehistoric’ and evidently not medieval. In the following decade, and after the discovery of the famous golden treasures at Mycenae and Troy, Schleimann conducted a quick excavation on top of the citadel, lasting less than 5 months, and in spite of his notoriously savage methods, he brought to light the greater part of the fortifications, as well as part of what is known today as the ‘megaron’ in the uppermost part of the citadel.
Today, the same walls, about 7m height, appeal instantly to the modern voyagers who pass by while rushing to reach Nafplio in the dead heat of summer. For myself too, the sight of the walls of Tiryns was a heavenly apparition in the early 1990s. It took my parents and I about 4 hours to travel from Athens to Nafplio every weekend in the late spring and early summer. I was ten years old, squeezed into the back of a small Seat 124D with open windows, in 30°C heat, with traffic fumes swirling around us, and I was desperate to run and jump into the sea with all my snorkelling gear. The voyage from Athens seemed to take an eternity. I listened to music, became bored, suffered from car sickness, but never slept because I was so anxious to arrive. I was looking forward to seeing these colossal walls appear on the right side of our car. My father was often the first to see them, exclaiming “Nota, look at this. Tiryns! We are almost there!”, and for the next 15 minutes I could hear the quickening beat of my heart, while I counted down until the moment that I could open the door and run onto the beach.
Tiryns Megaron and Throne Room
Almost ten years later, when I was a student in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Athens in the early 2000s, I learned that Tiryns’ fortification walls represent the apogee of Mycenaean military architecture. This was the last dawn of an amazing, prosperous and intense era in the Peloponnese, when Tiryns stood as the second most important citadel after Mycenae herself.
Tiryns developed into a Mycenaean stronghold (namely an economic, administrative and religious centre and seat of power) in the late 15th and 14th centuries BCE, together with most of the contemporary major sites that we know from Late Bronze Age Greece, such as Mycenae, Athens, Thebes, Pylos and many more. About a century later, ca. 1300-1250 BCE, it took part in a major remodelling process that saw the construction of new spectacular walls and towers that encompassed a great number of rooms and a new palatial complex with courts, corridors, monumental entrances, porticoes, altars, multiple chambers and a ‘megaron’ with a throne room at its very heart, partly similar to the other Mycenaean centres. Moreover, a mighty, virtually free-standing wall almost 7 meters thick was built at the same time to protect the growing harbour town in the lower part of the rocky outcrop (the so-called Lower Citadel) which back then lay just a kilometre from the coastline. Today, a lot of questions about Mycenaean Greece remain unanswered, but we can say with certainty that all Mycenaean ‘palatial’ centres reached the heyday of their wealth, fame and power in the course of the 13th century BCE, and suffered a fiery destruction that brought them to an end not long after 1200 BCE.
The Throne from Tiryns at the Athens National Museum
Most of these developments took place throughout Mycenaean Greece. But there is something that makes Tiryns exceptional: its unusual beginning as a place of power in the Early Bronze Age, and its spectacular final stages of life at the end of the Mycenaean period, that is to say a history written at each margin of a key era!
In Tiryns, the story of monumental architecture starts much earlier, in the 3rd millennium BCE, when the acropolis became a place of power. Here, the most important buildings of the Mycenaean palatial centre of the 14th and 13th centuries BCE came to be constructed on exactly the same spot of the citadel (at the highest point of the hill) where an Early Bronze Age building had stood some 1000 years earlier, around 2400-2200 BCE. The latter was what is known today as the Rundbau, which means “Round Building” in German, and in 1930 it was correctly identified by the German archaeologists who excavated the site, as the earliest monumental building in Greece. This colossal and peculiar circular structure of some 27 meters in diameter and at least 14 meters in height had thick stone and mud-brick walls and horseshoe-shaped buttresses around its perimeter. Although a number of theories were developed regarding its function, such as a granary, palace or strong fortified tower and final refuge in case of war, one thing is clear. It was the first building made to have an impact on observers and users. The Round Building was certainly meant to be seen from near and far, from competing settlements in the Argive plain and to anyone entering or leaving the Gulf of Argos. A clear manifestation of power!
The Rundbau, the earliest monumental building in Greece.
When it was destroyed by fire around 2000 BCE, the people of Tiryns formed a mound of earth 20 meters in diameter out of its ruins. This ‘tumulus’ that concealed and preserved a great part of the Round Building under this earth, was a new large and visible monument that remained inviolable for about 500 years, until eventually a new palatial concept was introduced in the Argolid and the first imposing buildings of 1400s BCE Mycenaean Tiryns were built directly on top on it. The excavation results suggest that the decision to choose this area for building new structures was partly guided by the wish to relate to the important monuments of the far distant past, which were still partly visible, and may have been remembered down through the generations via an oral tradition.
A view of the west stairs at Tiryns from near the top with the citadel is on the left, marked by grey masonry.
Mycenaean Tiryns was thus brought to life built on the ashes of its previous glory. For the next two centuries it was systematically developed until it became a major harbour and important palatial centre of the region, second only to Mycenae.
Around 1200 BCE a deep crisis, including continuous warfare, interruption of long-distance trade, political and social competition and upheavals, led inevitably to the demise of all the Mycenaean palaces, which were destroyed by massive fires.
A series of Mycenaean frescoed wall-paintings displayed as panels at the Athens National Museum
Tiryns, once more, followed a different historical trajectory. During the last decades of the 13th century, on the eve of the destruction, a new and very costly building program was carried out that included some of the most magnificent constructions of the era; a) a new palace with lavish wall paintings, porticoes, gates and multiple courts, b) new massive fortification walls with sally ports, vaulted galleries and storage rooms running across them, and c) a new dam whose construction followed the redirection of a stream and led to the drying out of the nearby marshland. Thus, the site was transformed, as German archaeologists have put it, into a Mycenaean Versailles, namely into a political centre in which one or several rulers of the last ‘Mycenaean generation’ implemented the most astonishing, up-to-date and expensive achievements of architecture and engineering.
In the immediate aftermath of Tiryn’s Bronze Age destruction, in the early 12th century, some surviving members of the community removed and levelled the debris in the central area of the citadel where the core of the palatial unit stood. On top of it they built a new structure, a large building visible from afar and surely of some great importance for the new post-palatial elite. Meanwhile, on the lower part of the hill and at the dried-out plain around it, new living quarters were created for the inhabitants of the plain, who were the true beneficiaries of the costly project of the redirection of the stream. As the excavations at the citadel and the new domestic areas have shown, this new post-palatial noble community of Tiryns manipulated the space to create a reference and links to the past and to claim nobility and perhaps continuity though descendancy. Where the other centres seem to have died, Tiryns survived.
A few centuries later, in the early Iron Age, the citadel was probably abandoned, the settlements around it transformed, new architectural forms and burials began to emerge, new people moved in and, eventually, the social memory of the past as well as the cohesion of the local community slowly disintegrated, leaving just the Cyclopean walls to mark the greatness of an era.
You can explore Tiryns with expert archaeologist guides on our Exploring the Peloponnese tour.
Leave a Reply