Ancient Greek

Marble temples with columns, entablature and pediment – the yardstick for all classical architecture ever since.

Greek temples were built as homes for the gods, not as places of assembly. What mattered was the exterior: a frame of columns around an enclosed cella, everything balanced according to fixed proportions. From this came the orders of columns, which Europe has been borrowing for two and a half thousand years.

In the 6th and 5th centuries BC Greece was a network of city-states, and temples were their foremost communal buildings. They were built of local limestone or marble without mortar, the blocks joined with iron clamps set in lead. Their proportions were discussed in treatises that have been lost but which Vitruvius summarised. With the conquests of Alexander the Great the style spread across the entire eastern Mediterranean.

There are no Greek buildings in Sweden, but the temple front arrived with Neoclassicism in the 18th century and lives on in everything from churches to banking palaces.

• Parthenon
• Second Temple of Hera, Paestum
• Erechtheion
• Temple of Hephaestus
• Theatre of Epidaurus
• Propylaea
• Temple of Apollo Epicurius
• Temple of Concordia
• Iktinos
• Parthenon
• Fyrtornet på Faros
• Artemistemplet i Efesos
• Erechtheion
• Panathinaikostadion
• Athena Niketemplet
• Temple of Zeus in Olympia
• Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus
• Temple of Apollo Epicurius in Bassae
• The Monument
• Serapeion
• Propyléerna
• Philippeion
• Stoa of Zeus
• Tholos of Delphi
• Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre
• Kolkata Town Hall
• Għargħur Parish Church
• Temple of Artemis in Magnesia on the Maeander