The Goddess of the Great Sanctuaries at Argos and Samos

Hera's worship centered on some of the oldest and most substantial sanctuaries in the entire Greek world, at Argos and at Samos, sites whose temples ranked among the largest built anywhere in Greece well before the classical period. The Heraion of Argos, on a ridge overlooking the Argive plain, served the region's leading cities as a shared religious center and is where excavation has recovered votive offerings stretching back into the Bronze Age, evidence that her cult there long predates the literary myths that later fixed her personality in marital jealousy. The Heraion of Samos grew even larger, eventually housing one of the biggest temples in the ancient Greek world, and drew offerings and dedications from across the eastern Mediterranean, a scale that marks Hera there as a major regional goddess of the island rather than only a jealous consort in someone else's story. Festivals in her honor, generally called Heraia, were held in numerous Greek cities and typically centered on marriage, fertility and the passage of young women into adult womanhood, a civic role that sat alongside, and was largely independent of, the mythological Hera whose feuds with Zeus's other lovers fill so much surviving poetry.