tiryns Photos

TIRYNS is a UNESCO world heritage site.

Tiryns is an archeological site in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, Greece. The oldest vestiges are from the Bronze Age (ab. 3000 BC), but Tiryns’ golden age was in the Mycenaean age, when a palace and a fortified complex were built here, and then rebuilt on a site covering 25 hectars, following a great earthquake and fire. The fortifications date back to the 14th-13th centuries BC. In the 5th century BC, Tiryns was already abandoned.

Tiryns and Mycenae were the two great centres of Mycenaean civilization, which dominated the South of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean world between the 17th-12th centuries BC, and it also had a great impact on the development of classic Greek culture and architecture – and implicitly on the European one. Connected to Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, the two state-cities influenced European art and literature deeply for a period of over three millenia.

(see Mycenae)