Where is Ancient Sparta?
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Modern Sparta has been rebuilt after centuries of neglect. And in the city itself, the only reminder of ancient Sparta is a solitary warrior standing next to the stadium. There's also a tiny museum consisting of three halls and excavations on the outskirts, which don't attract much attention from tourists. We'll explore this place, assessing whether these are truly the ruins of Ancient Sparta.
Among the olive trees, you won't immediately find any signs of what is proudly called the Spartan acropolis—that is, the sacred territory where the key temples of the ancient city were located.
As we walk along the path, here's a short excerpt from the traveler Pausanias's "Description of Hellas," who saw an entire open-air museum here. (...) Countless temples and statues!
No, these ruins are not Spartan. They are the remains of a Byzantine basilica. Like the Spartan antiquities, it was not the Turkish occupiers who plundered it, but the locals, who plundered the former glory of Hellas brick by brick, and the Catholic clergy, who received permission from the Turkish authorities to take away everything they could carry to the Vatican Museums or the Louvre. One of the most active expropriators of antiquities in Sparta employed the following tactic: what couldn't be removed was painted over and destroyed. Numerous Spartan inscriptions were embedded in the walls of Byzantine basilicas. And all of them were lost precisely because they were too massive.
This is what is being passed off as the Temple of Athena Copper-domed, the main temple of the Spartan acropolis. There is no basis for this, as the structure itself is completely destroyed, and the archaeological finds, which we will discuss another time, are quite strange. And then there's the theater, which, judging by Pausanias's descriptions, shouldn't be here. Here, it backs up to the Acropolis, while Pausanias places it off to the west, to the Agora, the main square. And Pausanias describes it as a white marble structure.
The front row seats are carved from stone, shaped like a human figure. Very comfortable. The capital of the Corinthian column is clearly of later origin, probably like the theater itself. But even if it were a Roman-era structure, Pausanias the traveler couldn't have failed to notice it. No, this is not the site of Ancient Sparta at all.
Incidentally, near the stadium, King Pausanias buried the bones of King Leonidas, who died at Thermopylae. Forty years after his death, they were recovered and transferred to Sparta. Why wasn't this done before? Perhaps the wars with Athens and its allies prevented it. Here are columns of unknown origin, stacked like firewood. Certainly not from Ancient Sparta, perhaps from the Byzantine period.
Trying the olives is not recommended. Unless you want to confirm that they are incredibly bitter. The ancient Greek who discovered a method for removing bitterness and extracting oil from olives was a genius. Perhaps for this, he was revered as a god—just like Dionysus, who taught how to make wine.
To summarize. No traces of the large structures described by Pausanias have been found on the outskirts of modern Sparta: there is no evidence of numerous architectural monuments in the Agora, the Acropolis is not located on a dominant peak (as Pausanias wrote), and the structures on it are very compact, and the theater is not where it should have been. We conclude that what has been excavated here is a small Laconian town with structures from the Roman or Byzantine period. The real Sparta was somewhere else.