<Location>Theatre of Dionysos Site, Athens, Attica, Greece
To the West of the Theatre of Dionysos, there was an important sanctuary of Asklepios. Asklepios was a god of the health and cure. Many people seeking for the cure flocked here.
When I visited here in 2005, a large scale restoration work was going on. They seemed to reconstruct some part of the sanctuary, including the temple, using new materials. Three columns seen in the first photo looked completely new.
The cult of Asklepios, originally from Epidauros in Argolis (of the Peloponnese peninsula) to Athens is dated to sometime after 429 BC, when there was an outblake of plague. This temple was first constructed by an Athenian citizen Telemachos, of Acharnai deme. Before that date, there was a cult activity related to water. The original wooden temple of Telemachos was replaced by the stone one in the fourth century BC, but this latter was badly damaged by an earthquake and was reconstructed within the same century. Some inscriptions tell us that it was restored again around the middle of the first century.
The cult of Asklepios declined in late Antiquity, but in this same place, the cult of Christian saints of health, St. Kosmas and Damianos, suceeded the pagan precedent, as can be known from the construction of a church in the fifth or sixth century.
