Aristotle's School

Aristotle's School, originally uploaded by Ava Babili.

The ruins of Aristotle's School have been found only 2 kilometers away from the contemporary Naoussa, at the district of Isvoria. Here is the place with the racing water and the deeply-shaded caves, mentioned by the ancient writers, where the greatest philosopher of the antiquity taught the classical Greek thought and the ideals of the Platonic philosophy to the King's of Macedonia, Phillip II, son, Alexander and the other nobles of the Macedonian court.

The area of the Nympheon, that is the sanctuary dedicated to the Nymphs, is a very impressive natural landscape, where the ancient remnants - a wall prop of a two-floored arcade with Ionic columns forming a Π - combined with the three natural caves which are found there, constitute the main grounds of the School. The vertical surface of the rock, where the openings for supporting the roof's girders are discernable, comprised the back-end of the shady stoa, (built at 350 B.C. and later), where Aristotle taught «the doctrines of morals and politics" (Plutarch VII, 668) to the youths of the Macedonian Nobility. The landscape, where the Great Teacher rambled with his students on the fully vegetation riverbank trails, among calm and cool streams of water, gushed from the springs around, is completed by an even greater cave, a little further off, with two carved entrances, obviously for devotional use.