The Oldest Temples in Greece

At Samos a striking ritual attached to Hera's cult image: ancient sources describe a festival called the Tonaia, at which her wooden cult statue, an old-style xoanon rather than a fully sculptural image, was ritually removed from the temple, in some accounts hidden or symbolically taken away, and then found, washed on the shore and returned in procession, an annual reenactment scholars connect to myths of Hera's own courtship or marriage to Zeus rather than to any simple washing rite. The practice is known mainly through later Greek writers describing older Samian custom, but it points to a cult considerably stranger and more ritually elaborate than the marble sanctuary remains alone would suggest.

Hera's image itself changed as much as the rites around it. The earliest cult statues across Greece were rigid, column-like wooden xoana with only the barest suggestion of a human face and form, typical of the most archaic phase of Greek religious sculpture. By the Classical period the Argive Heraion housed a fully realised chryselephantine statue by the sculptor Polykleitos, gold and ivory over a wooden core, showing an enthroned Hera with a pomegranate in one hand and a sceptre topped by a cuckoo in the other; Pausanias, who saw it centuries later, left the fullest ancient description of a statue that no longer survives in any form.