The word caryatid has entered every language that discusses classical architecture, but its origin is specific to one place and one ritual. Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, recorded what had been common knowledge in antiquity: in Karyes, Lacedaemonian virgins danced annually for Artemis Caryatis. The earliest caryatids were those women themselves — later, any female from the Laconian area who performed the caryatis dance earned the name. When Athenian architects wanted to represent female figures bearing the weight of a roof, they turned to this cultural image. Five of the six original caryatid statues from the Erechtheion, removed from the Acropolis due to air pollution, are now in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The sixth was taken to London in the early 19th century under orders attributed to Lord Elgin and has remained in the British Museum. Whether that removal was legal or ethical remains disputed; what is not in dispute is that the statues' name points back to a mountain village in Laconia.

Karyes sits in Laconia, the ancient Spartan heartland, on the southern slopes of Mount Parnon. The village belongs to the municipality of Sparta — the city that once governed the entire Laconian region, fought the Messinian Wars, clashed with Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and faced the Persian invasions. Karyes was part of that world, a village in a landscape of serious consequence. It was known as Arachova — from a Slavic word for walnut — until the name was officially changed to Karyes in 1930, reverting to the ancient classical name. The village square today has coffee shops, bars, and restaurants around it, as village squares in Greece tend to do. A clock tower built in 1955 replaced the previous one from 1930, which was destroyed during the Nazi occupation in 1944. A monument to 118 soldiers stands on the road between Sparta and Karyes, a quieter marker of more recent violence.

In the village square of Karyes, there is a monument to the caryatids — a recognition that this place, not the Acropolis, is where those famous figures originate. Beside the Church of the Assumption stand what the villagers call the Eternal Plane Trees: old, wide-canopied Oriental plane trees that shade the church courtyard and the square beyond. In Greek village life, the plane tree — platanos — is more than shade. It marks the center of a community, the place where people gather, where decisions were once made, where the coffee-house conversation still runs. A village with ancient plane trees is a village that has been continuously inhabited for a long time. Karyes has several churches — Saint Andreas, Saint Demetrios, Saint John, Saint Constantine, Saint Elias — as well as a primary school. The area is approximately 64 square kilometers, mountainous terrain in the shadow of Parnon, with views that open toward the eastern Peloponnese on clear days.

The ancient settlement of Karyai occupied the same site or its near vicinity. It was a place of enough significance that Pausanias visited and wrote about it, noting the sanctuary of Artemis and the ritual dances. The exact location of the ancient sanctuary has not been definitively established through excavation, but the tradition connecting the modern village to the ancient site has been consistent enough that scholars and the community both accept the connection. What you find in Karyes today is a lived-in mountain village, not an archaeological site with cordoned-off ruins. The Caryatid Monument in the square is a modern commemoration. The ancient history is present in a subtler form: in the name itself, in the architectural legacy carried on the Acropolis, and in the persistence of a community in a location where community has apparently existed since at least the centuries before our era.