Temples Everywhere!

This lovely Wednesday morning we actually got to visit the gorgeous temples we had seen last night, then headed off to another site...for more temples!

For anyone looking to keep track, every temple we’ve visited has been a Doric (or primarily Doric, some have had Ionic features) order temple, and these are no exceptions.

Our first visit was to the Valle Dei Templi of Agrigento—which, despite its name, is not a valley. Actually, the temples all sit on top of a long ridge, making for some very pretty views of the surrounding area. It also makes for a lot of hiking! Luckily, we got dropped off at one end of the ridge and then met up with Fabio bus a few hours later at the other end of the ridge, so we didn't have to hike back. On the other hand, this meant that when I saw a penny pressing machine outside the gate, after I had passed through the gate with my ticket, I didn't have a chance to go back and get a penny to add to my collection.

I got over that disappointment fairly quickly, though, because shortly up the hill was this gorgeous piece of architecture:

This is (nominally) the Temple of Hera! As I said before, any named temple should be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, it's quite lovely, if you like temples (and I do). They're built out of the local sandstone, so they've taken quite a beating from the elements (and have been reconstructed in some areas), but they're still in pretty good shape, including the large altar in front of the temple--there was definitely some climbing on that in order to get that picture.

This is what the temple looked like, standing next to it on ground level. And no, of course that wasn't just an excuse to post an artsy picture of columns :P (Oh, who am I kidding--there will be a lot of those. I really like architecture) And incidentally, as I was wandering around the temple trying to get pictures, I happened to see a bronze glint in the dirt--someone had dropped their souvenir penny, so happily I did end up getting my penny after all :)

After a brief lecture, we were on to our next stop, as you can see here. It's a little fuzzy because the sun is still coming up--we were up early, and we were in the mountains.

This is the Temple of Concord, of which I have a truly absurd number of pictures--partially because it's the second most complete temple surviving from antiquity, and partially because we had a very cool assignment here. For the majority of these temples, we're given a floorplan that shows walls, columns, etc--but this time, we were given sheets of graph paper and told to make the plan ourselves! It was surprisingly difficult but quite a lot of fun, and when we get back the assignment I'll see if I can scan it to post here.

Look who's actually inside the temple! I think this was the first temple we had the opportunity to actually go inside on this trip, and it was absolutely wonderful. The professors basically had to drag us all out so that we could move onto the next temple.

But first, more pretty pictures from the Temple of Concord :P The statue at the end is not original--there seems to be a current theme of putting modern art sculptures in ancient buildings, often only very tangentially related to the building they're in. Perhaps it draws in people who might not otherwise visit these temples, but in general the Centristi (myself included) are decidedly not fans of this convention, and I think that's about as politely as I can put it.

This one was shot from one end of the long pathway between the columns and the cella (on the right). The arches are also not original, they were cut into the originally solid cella walls when it was converted into a church.

Here’s a (cork again!) model of the Temple of Concord, from back at the hotel for lunch. Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled chronological order now.

When they finally did drag us away from the Temple of Concord, we went on to the Temple of Herakles (note the Greek spelling—we’re in Magna Graecia after all! The Temple of Herakles was in disappointing shape after the beautiful Temple of Concord, but there were COLUMNS!

This was about all that was left of the temple—all of the blocks scattered around were once part of it, but the columns are the only freestanding elements that remain.

Oh look, it’s Katie hanging around some more columns. What a surprise :)

Finally, our last stop in the Valle Dei Temple was the most impressive—our visit to the Olympieion (also known as the Temple of Olympian Zeus). You may remember the telemon and the cork model from the Agrigento museum in the last post—well, these are the actual remains of that temple. Sadly, there’s not much but remains—there’s mostly just large chunks of rock strewn around in various stages of carving. What is there is quite impressive though—this was intended to be the largest Doric temple ever, with a perimeter of 1000 feet!

Here’s one of the giant rock piles—see if you can spot the giant column capital on the left side. Also, the strange U-shape on the block near the center is not actually part of an inscription, as I first thought—it’s part of the block-and-tackle system used to haul these giant chunks of sandstone around.

What remains of the large altar upon which sacrifices would be performed—note the Centristi on it, theoretically for scale. More realistically, it’s just that we’ll climb onto or into pretty much anything—if you build it, we will climb.

One of the Doric capitals from the Olympieion—it’s biiiiig. Note that I’m standing on another chunk of rock (not visible in the picture) just to get up to its level.

Another one of the giant telemons, this time in situ—ignore the people at the top, the perspective is a little wonky. The statue is much bigger than it looks here.

Here’s some of the internal structure of the temple—unfortunately, I don’t know anything more than that. There’s a picture of it because I thought it looked cool, and I’ve never needed any other reason :)

We finally climbed down the other side of the ridge, where Fabio bus picked us up to head back around to see the Hellenistic Quarter at Agrigento before lunch. The Hellenistic Quarter was the residential area of Agrigento, and is the best preserved example of the shift from Greek peristyle (colonnaded) houses to Roman atrium houses in Sicily.

Oh yes. It’s also very large.

Here’s a bit better look at how the area was laid out—the city of Agrigento was orthogonally planned (unlike Rome, which grew up “organically”, which is the nicer, more professional way to say “people built everywhere and created a mess of streets”), so the streets and houses are in a wonderful grid pattern. Naturally, this didn’t mean we used the actual streets—remember what I said about climbing?

Hi :D

I have tons of pictures of the Hellenistic Quarter, but I doubt they’d be of much interest to a non-Classics major, as it’s basically “ooh, look at the outline of the rooms!” So, have some pictures of mosaics instead—these were some of the floor mosaics in the houses. The second one is more blurry because it’s more ornate, and therefore behind glass to protect it.

Anyway, we eventually headed back to the hotel to have lunch, and then back on the bus to drive to Selinunte for our last site of the day, and one of my overall favorites. There were lots of temples at Selinunte—I know of at least seven, and there may have been more that I’m just not remembering (or finding in my notes). We visited four temples at Agrigento, and three at Selinunte, so you can imagine where the title for this post came from!

Selinunte is apparently either not touristy enough or just honest enough to admit that there’s no good evidence to identify these temples. Therefore, this is Temple E (I think—I’ll admit that my notes on the identifications aren’t great. I was too busy staring in awe).  As you can see, we got to go into this one too (actually, all of the Selinunte temples), and it was great. We had an...amusing run-in with a tour guide who thought we were muscling in on her turf, but I think I’ll save that story for more private venues—remind me when I talk to you next and I’d be glad to tell it.

I’m sure you can imagine that I have plenty of photos of this temple, especially since we got to go inside and look around. I have, as ever, attempted to pick just the best ones for your perusal. These are both from inside the temple—the first one is toward the back of the temple, where the back wall and part of the side walls of the cella are still intact. The second one is from on top of the remains of the (shorter) cella wall, toward one of the front corners of the temple.

This was shot standing in one of the aisles of the temple, toward the inner columns. You can see the trigylphs standing up alone—the metopes were removed to a museum, if I recall correctly.

I told you there would be at least one picture of me hugging a column!

Here’s the best picture I have of the temple as a whole—sadly, the sun casts it into shadow. If you squint, you should be able to see the dog curled up on the ground near the temple entrance, acting as the animal of the day :P

When we were done at Temple E, we met up at “the pile of rocks over there—not that one closest to us, but the other pile of rocks” (yes, that’s how our professors described Temple G to us). Selinunte outstripped every other Greek city in regards to temples—this huge temple is built earlier and bigger than the Olympieion (it’s 110 by 60 m and was built around 530 BCE). Sadly, it’s not in much better shape than the Olympieion—it looks like it imploded. On the other hand, this meant lots of climbing fun—the professors know us very well, and gave us about half an hour to indulge our acrobatic urges, just telling us to be careful and not to climb anything that we couldn’t safely get back down from.

As we were entering, we found this lovely capital just lying on the ground, begging to have silly pictures taken on top of it—this was mine. I suppose I could have done a proper caryatid pose, but I’m not sure my professors (or my parents, but they weren't there to stop me) would have approved of me doing a handstand on top of a sloped rock!

You can see why it was nicknamed the “pile of rocks”, I think. However, it’s a pile of sculpted rocks, which makes it all the cooler—we were climbing on column drums, column capitals, rectangular wall blocks, just huge chunks of former temple. The second picture should give you a better idea of what these were like.

I’m ON TOP OF THE WORLD! (no, not really—the person taking the photo is just standing about five feet below me on another rock).

This is the largest freestanding piece of the temple left—it’s FRIGGIN’ GINORMOUS! Brittany, standing there at the bottom, isn’t even all that close to the base of the column.

Another shot for scale—you’ve seen these little tooth-like decorations at the base of triglyphs on lots of my pictures. Well, there’s my (size 7 ½) foot for comparison.

We eventually did let ourselves be dragged away from the temple (the threat of having to walk to the next temple worked pretty well—watching about twenty students classics-parkour back across the temple at top speed was awesome) and hopped on the bus to take us up the hill to the last temple of the evening.

Of course, as we walked the last part, we had this lovely view off the side of the road—one of the best parts of the Sicily trip for me has been that we’ve always gotten these great little reminders that we’re on an island, which means that there’s almost always views of the coastline.

Unfortunately, I don’t have many pictures of this temple—partially because it’s not in very good shape, partially because the sun was setting and messing with the light, and partially because my poor camera battery was dying under the load of pictures I’d been taking. These are really the only two good ones I have—the first one shows the remaining standing columns in the background, with the foreground showing the remains of some shops (the square-shaped walls). The second picture is just the temple, with the steps up to the platform.

Our very last stop, just a short walk from Temple C, was this North Gate. It’s a defensive fortification, much like Castle Euryalus (but not as good), built sometime around the 3^rd century BCE, after the Carthaginians had laid siege to the city and sacked it in only nine days. It’s very sturdy, as you can see by how much of it survived!

Of course, I say that this was our last stop, and as far as our schedule was concerned it was—but Franco had other ideas. He said that we would be visiting “Temple F” next—Temple Franco (amusingly, there is actually a Temple F at Selinunte). This wonderful Franco Surprise was a stop at a little wine and food shop where he knew the owners. They gave us samples of some wonderful wines, olives, bruschetta, and olive oil, and then turned us loose to buy up as much of the store as we could possibly afford. It was spectacularly fun, we got to eat some great food, and I found some nice Christmas gifts, mostly for myself :P All in all, a wonderful day!

[Another note from the future (as in, the day I'm posting this): Still working on getting caught up, and we're unfortunately to the days that I don't have a full post written for yet--and in case you're curious, these all-day posts take about 2 hours to write, not including the upload time for pictures. Also, school is doing its best to keep me busy, and we've just finished our second week long trip, in Campania this time. I assure you, all of the posts will be written...it's just taking longer than expected. Thanks for your patience!]