Metroon was the name given to a building dedicated to the mother goddess

Mother goddess

Mother goddess is a term used to refer to a goddess who represents motherhood, fertility, creation or embodies the bounty of the Earth. When equated with the Earth or the natural world such goddesses are sometimes referred to as Mother Earth or as the Earth Mother.Many different goddesses have...

, Cybele

Cybele

Cybele , was a Phrygian form of the Earth Mother or Great Mother. As with Greek Gaia , her Minoan equivalent Rhea and some aspects of Demeter, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth...

, Rhea

Rhea (mythology)

Rhea was the Titaness daughter of Uranus, the sky, and Gaia, the earth, in Greek mythology. She was known as "the mother of gods". In earlier traditions, she was strongly associated with Gaia and Cybele, the Great Goddess, and was later seen by the classical Greeks as the mother of the Olympian...

, or Demeter

Demeter

In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, who presided over grains, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons . Her common surnames are Sito as the giver of food or corn/grain and Thesmophoros as a mark of the civilized existence of agricultural society...

, in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

.

Agora, Athens

The Metroon in the Ancient Agora of Athens

Ancient Agora of Athens

The Ancient Agora of Athens is the best-known example of an ancient Greek agora, located to the northwest of the Acropolis and is bounded on the south by the hill of the Areopagus and on the west by the hill known as the Colonus Agoraeus.-History:The agora in Athens had private housing, until it...

 was originally used as the meeting chamber of the boule

Boule (Ancient Greece)

In cities of ancient Greece, the boule meaning to will ) was a council of citizens appointed to run daily affairs of the city...

 or city council. At the end of the 5th century BCE, when a new Bouleuterion

Bouleuterion

A bouleuterion was a building which housed the council of citizens in Ancient Greece. There are several extant remains of Bouleuterions around Greece and former Greek territories of ancient times....

 was built, the building was dedicated to the mother goddess. The Metroon also housed the official archives of the city.

Olympia

Part of the complex of Olympia

Olympia, Greece

Olympia , a sanctuary of ancient Greece in Elis, is known for having been the site of the Olympic Games in classical times, comparable in importance to the Pythian Games held in Delphi. Both games were held every Olympiad , the Olympic Games dating back possibly further than 776 BC...

, and sited immediately below the terrace which houses the Treasuries

Treasuries at Olympia

The Treasuries at Olympia were a series of small temple-shaped buildings located to the north side of the Altis or sanctuary at the site of Olympia in Greece. All but two were erected by Greek colonies to store valuable votive offerings....

, is the late 4th/early 3rd century Metroon.