A big room with a fire
Megaron is simply Greek for “large hall”, from megas, great. Archaeologists use it for a particular kind of building: a long rectangle divided into three parts in a row. First comes a porch, open at the front, with two columns between the ends of the side walls; then a vestibule, a narrower room; and finally the main hall. In the middle of the hall burned a round hearth, and four columns arranged in a square around it held up the roof, with an opening above the fire for light and smoke. Long halls with a porch existed much earlier, for example at Troy in the mid-third millennium BCE, but in every Mycenaean palace the megaron became the central, most important room.
The best example: Pylos
The megaron best preserved is at Pylos, in the palace excavated by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen from 1939 and burned around 1180 BCE. Its throne room measures about 13 by 11 metres. The hearth in the centre, 4 metres across, was coated with plaster and painted around the rim with flames, black on white. The four columns were of wood, each carved with 32 flutes, and stood on stone bases that are still in place. Against the east wall, on the right as you came in, stood the throne, and on the walls around it painted lions and griffins faced it like guards.
The floor, the walls and even the hearth were painted. In practice, the room was designed to impress: anyone who reached it had already crossed courts, a gateway, a porch and a vestibule, and found the ruler seated at the side of a great fire, framed by mythical beasts.
What happened in a megaron?
The Linear B tablets name the ruler of each palace, a wanax, and the megaron was where he appeared in public. Three activities left traces there. Feasts: in the pantries next to the throne room at Pylos, Blegen found great numbers of drinking cups, stacked and ready for large communal banquets. Rituals: the tablets record offerings to the gods, and a hearth painted with flames at the centre of the room was more than a heater. Government: messengers, officials and guests were received in the hall, close to the archive rooms by the entrance where the tablets were kept.
From palace to poem to temple
After the palaces fell, around 1200 BCE, the megaron lived on in memory. In Homer’s Odyssey the megaron is the great hall of Odysseus’s house on Ithaca, where the suitors feast for years at his expense and where, in Book 22, he finally kills them. The poem describes a world centuries later than Pylos, but the word and the idea of the hall as the heart of a house came from the Bronze Age.
The plan survived too. A long room entered through a porch with two columns on its short side, with a focal point at the back, is also the basic plan of many early Greek temples. In the temple, the central room, the cella, held the statue of a god instead of the king’s throne, and a ring of columns was added all around. Not every scholar agrees on how direct the line of descent is, but the family resemblance is clear, and UNESCO counts its influence on classical Greek architecture among the reasons Mycenae and Tiryns are World Heritage.
Where to see it
The throne room of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, in Messenia, can be seen from walkways under a protective roof, with the hearth and column bases in place. At Tiryns and Mycenae, in the Argolid, the floors and bases of the megara survive on the top of the citadels. Check opening times with the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Sources
- C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia, vol. I (1966).
- University of Cincinnati, Department of Classics, Pylos excavations.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941).
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 22.
- O. Dickinson, The Aegean Bronze Age (1994).
