The cave is small and intimate rather than grand. Conical in shape, it runs back about 11.5 meters from an opening some 7.8 meters wide and 3.4 meters high, facing north. A flat forecourt once extended about two meters in front of it, a kind of natural threshold for whatever rituals took place at the mouth. Traces of mortar survive on the side walls, the floor, and the forecourt, showing that these surfaces were deliberately plastered - an effort to civilize the raw rock into a sanctuary. Such settings were exactly what the ancient Greeks associated with Pan: secluded, wooded, easily reached by shepherds and travelers looking for shelter, far enough from the city to feel like the god's own country.

The first modern study began on 25 March 1932, led by the Greek architect and archaeologist Ioannis Travlos. Beneath a thin layer of soil and animal dung, the excavators found the debris of worship: animal bones, some of them burnt, and fragments of goat horns - the residue of sacrifices and burnt offerings. There were seashells, pottery sherds, an intact clay lamp, and ash from old hearths. Many of the pottery fragments came from loutrophoroi, the tall vessels tied to ritual and to the thresholds of life and death. Most evocative were the clay figurines: the god Pan himself, the goddess Aphrodite, the Silenoi - earthy companions of Dionysus linked to flowing water and fertility - and a number of female figures. Some sherds carried scenes suggestive of nymphs, the deities who, in myth, kept Pan constant company.

The finds were modest in number, but they were enough to date the cave's active life with some confidence. Worship here flourished in a fairly narrow window - from the time of the Greco-Persian Wars through the mid- to late fifth century BC. After that the evidence simply stops. No younger artifacts have turned up, so archaeologists assume the cult faded out by the close of the fifth century BC. It is a poignant detail: a shrine that burned bright for only a few generations, then went quiet. Why people stopped coming, no one can say for certain. The cave kept no record of its own abandonment - only the absence of anything left behind after a certain point.

The cave did not stay empty forever. In early Christian times, with the great Byzantine monastery of Daphni rising nearby, the hollow found new purpose. There are signs it served again as a sanctuary, or perhaps as a retreat for hermits drawn to its isolation - and a large painted cross still marks the left wall of the interior, a quiet overwriting of the pagan past. Soot on the cave's roof speaks of fires lit across many eras. Later still, likely during the centuries of Ottoman rule and after the monks had gone, the same space was put to humbler use as a temporary sheep stable. A cave first sacred to a goat-god ended, fittingly enough, sheltering goats - the divine and the daily folded into the same patient stone.