Guide
The Smintheion stands in the town of Gülpınar in the Ayvacık district of Çanakkale and is counted among the most important sanctuaries of the late Hellenistic period in Anatolia. Its temple of Apollo Smintheus was built around 150 BC and is, according to the Culture Portal, the only cult of Apollo in Anatolia known by the symbol of the mouse; the epithet means lord of the mice, and the temple was dedicated to the god in his role of protecting farmers from them.
It is Ionic, and it uses the pseudodipteros plan — a false double row of columns — devised by Hermogenes, the architect who set his mark on Hellenistic architecture in Anatolia. There are eight columns across the front and back and fourteen along each long side.
What sets it apart is the sculpture. The friezes take their subject from the Trojan war as told in Homer's Iliad, and a temple decorated with Iliad reliefs is a single example with no parallel.
A 110-centimetre fragment of a leg was found in the naos, from a statue of Apollo by the Parian sculptor Skopas. That statue appears on Hellenistic coins of Alexandria Troas and is mentioned by ancient writers; it is thought to have stood on the temple front, to have been perhaps five metres tall, and to have shown the god treading on a mouse. Life-size mouse sculptures made for the excavation now stand on the temple steps, and the foot sculptures worked out from that reconstruction are displayed on the museum terrace. Besides the temple, the sanctuary holds the altar where sacrifices were made and buildings put up to serve the people who came to worship and to visit.
