The Temple of Apollo Daphnephoros is Eretria’s most important and well-known monument. Together with its surrounding wall, it formed the sacred precinct of Apollo, the religious centre and the primary place of worship of the ancient city, located in its central core, north of the agora. According to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, when the god sought a location to establish his oracle, he arrived at the Lelantine Plain.
The first temple dates back to the Geometric period and was likely near the harbour, as the sea reached the agora area then. It was a hundred-foot-long apsidal structure, the oldest of its kind mentioned by Homer and slightly later than the hundred-foot-long temple of Heraion on Samos. Next, another apsidal structure was discovered in the southern part, the oldest in Eretria, known as the Daphnephorion (7.5 x 11.5 m). This structure is associated with the early worship of Apollo at Delphi. In the centre of this building, clay bases were preserved, which supported laurel trunks that formed the roof’s framework.
At the beginning of the 6th century BCE, a second hundred-foot-long temple was built over the Geometric structure, following the filling of the ground and creating a solid terrace. This temple featured wooden columns—six on the narrow sides and nineteen on the long sides—but it, too, was eventually buried to make way for a new, more prominent temple.
Construction of this new temple began in the late 6th century BCE (520–490 BCE) and may not have been completed when the Persians destroyed the city in 490 BCE.
