The Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace

Gods so secret it was forbidden to say their names

The Sanctuary of the Great Gods lies on three narrow terraces on the western slopes of Mount Hagios Georgios on Samothrace, in the northern Aegean, between steep stream beds just outside the walls of the ancient city. It was one of the great religious centres of the Greek world, celebrated everywhere for its mysteries, and the deepest secret was the gods themselves. Speaking their names was taboo. Inscriptions call them only the Great Gods, and ancient writers the Cabeiri: underworld powers mostly older than the Greek settlers of the 7th century BC, gathered around a Great Mother whose secret name was Axieros, worshipped at outcrops of red, green, blue and grey porphyry. Her power ran in veins of magnetic iron, and initiates wore rings of it to know one another; some have been found in the graves nearby.

Unlike Eleusis, Samothrace asked nothing of its initiates but that they come. Men and women, children, Greeks and foreigners, free and enslaved could all be initiated, on any day, and could take both degrees at once. At night, dressed in white and carrying a lamp, the candidate entered the Anaktoron, the House of the Lords, to be washed, to pour a libation and to sit on a round platform while dancers circled, before being led into an inner room forbidden to the uninitiated. The reward was hope of a better life and above all protection at sea, sealed with a crimson sash knotted at the waist. Sailors and fishermen left humble thanks: excavators have found seashells and fish hooks among the offerings. The few who sought the second degree were questioned overnight, and probably confessed their sins, before the Hieron.

Herodotus was an initiate, and so was the Spartan Lysander. Plutarch tells that Philip of Macedon, still a youth, fell in love with Olympias while both were being initiated here, and their son became Alexander the Great. Macedon made the sanctuary its own, and Alexander's successors competed to outbuild each other: the great rotunda of Arsinoe II, the propylaeum of Ptolemy II and, probably, a fountain in the form of a ship's prow carrying a winged Victory. The last king of Macedon, Perseus, fled here after his defeat at Pydna in 168 BC and was arrested by the Romans. The sanctuary flourished under Rome, Hadrian came to visit, and the cult faded only at the end of antiquity.

In 1863 the French consul Charles Champoiseau found that Victory on the site, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace now stands in the Louvre. In 1938 New York University's Institute of Fine Arts began the excavations that uncovered the Anaktoron, and they continue today.