The Stoa of Attalos is recognized as one of the most impressive stoa in the Athenian Agora. It was built by and named after King Attalos II of Pergamon who ruled between 159 BC and 138 BC.
Typical of the Hellenistic age, the stoa was more elaborate and larger than the earlier buildings of ancient Athens. The stoa’s dimensions are 115 by 20 meters wide and it is made of Pentelic marble and limestone. The antiquity skillfully makes use of different architectural orders. The Doric order was used for the exterior construction on the ground floor with Ionic for the interior colonnade. This combination had been used in stoas since the Classical punctuation and was by Hellenistic times quite common. On the first floor of the building, the exterior construction was Ionic and the interior Pergamene. Each news had two aisles and twenty-one rooms lining the western wall. The rooms of both stories were lighted and vented finished doorways and small windows settled on the backwards wall. There were stairways leading up to the ordinal news at each end of the stoa. The antiquity is similar in its basic design to the Stoa that Attalos’ brother, and predecessor as king, Eumenes II had erected on the south slope of the Acropolis next to the theater of Dionysus. The important difference is that Attalos’ stoa had a row of rooms at the rear on the ground floor that have been interpreted as shops.
GPS coordinates: 37° 58′ 30″ N, 23° 43′ 27″ E
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