Wild Celery
Kongo went ashore at Trapani and drove an hour and a half southeast, to a plateau above the Mediterranean where the Greeks built a great city and named it after a vegetable.
Selinus. Wild celery — selinon — which grew thick along the river and which the city stamped on its coins for three hundred years. A celery leaf. That was the civic brand. Then they used the money to build the largest temple anyone in the Greek west had ever attempted.
The monkey was ashore on foot, in the sun, drinking water like it was his job, exactly as promised.
Two Temples, Fifty Meters Apart
Temple E stands. It has columns, an architrave, the top of a wall, the general air of a building that survived.
It didn’t. Italian archaeologists put it back up between 1956 and 1959, and there are people in the field who still think they shouldn’t have. Kongo has no dog in that fight, but he notes that the argument is not really about Temple E. It is about whether a ruin is allowed to be legible.
Walk three hundred metres west, past the wreck of Temple F, and you get the other answer.
Temple G was begun around 525 BC and was never finished. It would have run 113 metres by 54, with columns sixteen metres high — bigger than the Parthenon, by a colony, on the far edge of the Greek world. Today it is a field. Drums, capitals, architrave blocks, the whole vocabulary of a temple emptied out across four acres like a child’s box of Legos kicked over by something enormous.
Two ways of handling the same disaster, in sight of each other. One rebuilt so you can see what was lost. One left so you can see the losing.
What Actually Knocked It Down
Not the war. This is the part Kongo had wrong walking in.
Carthage came in 409 BC. Nine days of siege, and by the count that comes down to us sixteen thousand people were killed in a city that had stood for two centuries. But the temples were still standing when that was over. Armies kill people. They rarely have the equipment to level a hundred-and-thirteen-metre building.
The ground did that, and it took its time. Archaeoseismologists have gone over the debris field reading the way the stone lies — which direction the drums fell, which courses went first, what landed on what — and they can pick out two separate earthquakes in the wreckage. One somewhere in the fourth or third century BC. Another between the sixth and the thirteenth century AD.
The second one brought down a building that had already been standing empty and forgotten for a thousand years or more, in a place where by then nobody was left to hear it.
Nobody Zoned This
Right at the foot of the ruin field, close enough to throw a stone, are house walls. Low, rough, domestic — kitchen-sized rooms in undressed rubble, sitting in the shadow of a temple to Zeus.
Kongo’s first reaction was that this was a remarkable failure of planning. What was it like living there? The smell of it, the noise?
The honest answer to which is: those two things never happened at once.
The houses came after. They belong to the people who lived here once the Greek city was finished — a mixed Greek and Punic population under Carthaginian rule, who moved into the sanctuary district and built shops and homes in it, because a wrecked holy precinct is flat ground with a lot of free building stone lying about. On the acropolis across the valley the same thing is documented from the third quarter of the fourth century BC: the sacred quarter turned residential and commercial, gods evicted, tenants in.
Which is worse than bad zoning, and much more interesting. Nobody built a house next to a working temple. Somebody built a house in the ruins of one, and lived there, and hung their laundry on a god.
As for the smell — when the temples were working, it would have been a slaughterhouse. Sacrifice was butchery, performed at an open-air altar in front of the building, in the sun. Blood, burning fat, singed hair, smoke, flies, and the noise of animals that have worked out what is happening. The Greeks did not experience any tension between that and the architecture. We inherited the marble and threw away the abattoir.
They didn’t last either. Around 250 BC, during the first war with Rome, Carthage pulled the whole population out and moved them to Lilybaeum, and the site went quiet for two thousand years.
What the Buildings Were Actually Wearing
The stone is a warm rosy limestone, coarse and pitted, full of holes. Beautiful now. It was never meant to be seen.
Look at the columns and you find patches of fine white plaster still clinging in the flutes — stucco, laid over the rough limestone and polished, to make a provincial temple built of cheap local rock look like imported marble. Then it was painted. Reds and blues on the entablature.
So the honeyed golden ruin that everybody photographs, Kongo very much included, is an accident. On the day it opened this thing was blinding white and painted like a fairground, standing over a butcher’s yard, in the middle of a city that put celery on its money.
The other thing, which Kongo went and looked up afterwards because it bothered him: the Doric column has no base. None. The shaft comes down and sits on the top step and that is the end of the discussion — no moulding, no plinth, no transition, nothing to explain the join. Ionic and Corinthian columns get a base. Doric doesn’t bother.
The Other Hill
Away across the valley, on a headland right above the sea, there is a second one of these — the acropolis, with Temple C standing on the skyline.
Kongo wanted to know why a colony of this size needed two enormous building sites a mile and a half apart.
The acropolis was first: the fortified core, walls, the oldest temples, Temple C from around 550 BC. The East Hill came later, outside the walls, when the money arrived and the ambitions no longer fit inside the fortifications. You cannot put a hundred-and-thirteen-metre temple in a defended town centre. So they didn’t.
But stand where the ship’s guide won’t take you, and look at the two hills from seaward in your head, and the arrangement makes a different kind of sense. Both of them are on the skyline from the water. A ship closing this coast saw temples before it saw a harbour. That is not devotion, or not only devotion. That is a city telling everyone who approaches exactly how much money it has.
Kongo has spent a lot of his life looking at coastlines from the bridge of a ship and recognises a statement of account when he sees one.
The Small Museum
Loom weights. Dozens of them. Oil lamps, potsherds, and a case of iron spear and arrow points.
Three of those are the most ordinary objects a household can own. The fourth is 409 BC. In the excavations at Temple R on the acropolis they pulled more than twenty arrowheads out of the ground, along with a bronze sheet smashed flat where it fell.
The loom weights are the ones that stay with you. Every one of them is somebody’s mother’s, and there are so many of them that they are archaeologically boring, and that is the whole point. Sixteen thousand people did not die in a battle. They died in a town.
Off Corsica
There is one more picture, and it is not from Sicily.
That white line is Bonifacio, on the southern tip of Corsica, shot from the deck the day before arriving in Trapani. It is a narrow slot in vertical limestone — sheer cliffs on both sides, a mouth you cannot see until you are in it, and dead flat water inside.
Homer describes exactly that harbour in Book 10 of the Odyssey. Odysseus brings his fleet to Telepylos in the land of the Laestrygonians, eleven ships moor inside the lovely sheltered basin, he alone has the sense to make fast outside the entrance — and the giants come to the cliff edge and drop rocks on the trapped ships and spear the men in the water like fish. Eleven ships lost in minutes. About six hundred men down to forty-five.
Victor Bérard put Telepylos at Bonifacio, and standing on deck looking at that coast you can see why.
Now the arithmetic. The colonists who founded Selinus came out from Megara Hyblaea around 628 BC. The Odyssey reached something like its final shape perhaps seventy-five to a hundred years before that. It was current literature. Those men grew up on it. And then they got into boats and sailed west into precisely the sea the poem was set in, past the Cyclopes at Etna, past Scylla and Charybdis in the Straits, past the cliff where every listener knew eleven ships had been destroyed — and the western Greeks pinned those episodes onto real headlands as fast as they found them, because that is what the poem was for. It wasn’t a fairy tale to them. It was the last thing anyone had written about where they were going.
They sailed into the story on purpose. Founded a city, named it after the weeds, put the weeds on the coins, got rich, built the biggest temple in the west and never finished it.
Then the giants came over the cliff edge after all, in 409 BC, and the ground finished the job at its leisure over the following thousand years.
Travel safe. Have fun!