The Temple That Never Fell: Hephaestus Over the Athenian Agora

The atlas records Hephaestus's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the clearest concrete evidence of that standing is still standing itself. The Hephaisteion, a Doric temple on the hill of Agoraios Kolonos overlooking the Athenian Agora, was built in the fifth century BCE and dedicated jointly to Hephaestus and Athena, patrons of craft and metalwork, in a district of the city where smiths and metalworkers actually worked. Unlike almost every other major temple of classical Greece, it survives today essentially intact, its columns, roof and much of its sculptural decoration still in place, a state of preservation owed in part to its later conversion into a Christian church, which protected the structure through the centuries when so many pagan temples were quarried for building stone. That same long afterlife left the building carrying the wrong name for much of the modern era: nineteenth-century antiquarians, reading its sculpted metopes as scenes from the life of the hero Theseus, called it the Theseion, a name still attached to the surrounding metro station and neighborhood in Athens today even though archaeological study later corrected the identification back to Hephaestus's own temple. Where Hephaestus's own myth gives him a body that does not match the Olympian ideal, the temple built in his name has outlasted the temples of gods whose myths gave them none of his disadvantages, and it did so for so long that observers eventually forgot whose temple they were even looking at.