Wiktionary
n. In Greek architecture, a porch at the rear of a temple, set against the blank back wall of the cella.
Wikipedia
An opisthodomos (ὀπισθόδομος, 'back room') can refer to either the rear room of an ancient Greek temple or to the inner shrine, also called the adyton ('not to be entered'); the confusion arises from the lack of agreement in ancient inscriptions. In modern scholarship, it usually refers to the rear porch of a temple. On the Athenian Acropolis especially, the opisthodomos came to be a treasury, where the revenues and precious dedications of the temple were kept. Its use in antiquity was not standardised. In part because of the ritual secrecy of such inner spaces, it is not known exactly what took place within opisthodomoi: it can safely be assumed that practice varied widely by place, date and particular temple.
Architecturally, the opisthodomos (as a back room) balances the pronaos or porch of a temple, creating a plan with diaxial symmetry. The upper portion of its outer wall could be decorated with a frieze, as on the Hephaisteion and the Parthenon.
Opisthodomoi are present in the layout of:
- Temples ER, A and O at Selinus
- Temple of Aphaea at Aegina
- Temple of Zeus at Olympia
- Hephaisteion in the Agora of Athens
- Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens
- Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion
- Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae
- Temple of Athena Lindia at Lindos
- Temple of Dionysus at Teos
Usage examples of "opisthodomos".
Of the walls of the cella and opisthodomos nothing remains, but the foundations of this part are made of the hard blue limestone of the Acropolis, while the foundations of the outer part are of reddish-gray limestone from the Peiraieus.
Erechtheion, because there was no means of passing from the cella of that temple into the opisthodomos, and in order to reach the Pandroseion the dog would have had to come out from the temple by the door by which he entered it.
But hitherto the opisthodomos in question has been supposed to be the rear part of the Parthenon, and there is no direct proof that Demosthenes and Xenophon refer to the same fire.
Now the treasury of Athens was the opisthodomos, and the western room of the Parthenon was, from the moment of the completion of the building, the greatest opisthodomos in Athens.