The Apollo Temple on Sikinos

Modern archaeological effort, in its zeal to exhibit every surviving vestige of antiquity, has removed from most ancient buildings all the accretions of later ages, and although much has been gained for our knowledge of their original condition quite as much has often been lost to our realisation of history. The buildings of the ancients, when no longer needed for their first purposes, were not always or even generally destroyed; they were adapted to the needs of the newer world, and of this process, by which the Parthenon became first a church and then a mosque, and the theatre of Marcellus at Rome is still an inhabited block of shops and dwellings, a small but interesting example is to be found on the island of Sikinos, where the temple of the Pythian Apollo, at some period converted into a church by the addition of the features necessary to the Greek rite, still remains in that condition as the church of the Episkope. It is, therefore, not the cleaned-up ruin to which our eyes have grown so accustomed, but an untouched historical document of the vicissitudes undergone by so many of the buildings of antiquity.