It was ninety-something and the ridge has no shade worth the name.
Kongo has, at this point in the voyage, become extremely serious about water. He drank on the coach, he drank at the gate, he drank at every temple, and at no point in the afternoon did anybody have to put a needle in him. Progress is progress.
It Is Not a Valley
The Valley of the Temples is a ridge. It runs about two kilometres east to west with the sea three kilometres off to the south, and the Greek city of Akragas sat on the high ground behind it. Somebody in the eighteenth century called it a valley and it stuck, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this place has been handled.
We walked it east to west, downhill, which is the correct direction and which Kongo will take credit for.
Juno, and an Army He Keeps Meeting
The Temple of Juno sits at the top of the eastern end. Kongo went looking at the stone, because he had been told what to look for, and it is there — patches of the limestone reddened and flaked and spalled, the surface cooked off. Fire damage.
Carthage burned this city in 406 BC.
Which is three years and about a hundred kilometres from the last thing Kongo stood in. Selinunte went down in 409. Same war, same commanders, same fleet coming up out of Africa and working along the south coast of Sicily taking Greek cities one at a time.
Kongo has spent two shore days now walking around inside the results of a single military campaign, in reverse order, without meaning to. He is beginning to feel that he is following an army around.
The Giant
At the western end is what is left of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It would have been one of the largest temples in the Greek world.
It was never finished, and the reason it was never finished is that the Carthaginians turned up in the middle of construction.
Kongo has now seen two colossal unfinished Greek temples in three days, in two different cities, stopped by the same army. There is a pattern here and it is not a subtle one.
The account that comes down to us says the thing was being built with Carthaginian prisoners taken at Himera in 480 BC. If that is true, then this temple was raised by Carthaginian captives and then stopped by a Carthaginian army seventy-four years later, which is the sort of arrangement Kongo has learned to expect from history and still finds a little on the nose.
Holding up the entablature were the telamons — giant stone men, arms raised over their heads, taking the load. In February 2024 the park re-erected one of them, out of original blocks, on a steel armature twelve metres high.
They were careful about what they called it. Not an anastylosis — a musealization.
Kongo spent thirty years around people who choose a word precisely in order to avoid a fight, and he recognises the technique. Somebody in that building knew exactly which argument they were declining to have.
Concordia, Which Survived by Being Useful
The Temple of Concordia is the best-preserved Greek temple in Sicily and about the best anywhere outside Athens, and it did not survive because anybody revered it.
In the sixth century AD the local bishop made it a church. They walled up the gaps between the columns and cut twelve arches through the cella walls, and a building that was being converted was a building that was not being quarried.
Every other temple on this ridge got taken apart for its stone. Concordia got a congregation.
Two More Answers
Heracles is the oldest temple here and eight of its thirty-eight columns are standing. They are standing because of an Englishman.
Alexander Hardcastle was a retired British officer who moved to Agrigento in the 1920s, fell completely for the place, and poured his own money into excavating and re-erecting it until there was no money left. He died there, broke.
The Dioscuri is the four-column corner with the fragment of cornice on top. It is on the tourist posters, it is on the wine labels, it is more or less the emblem of Sicily.
It was assembled in the nineteenth century out of pieces of several different buildings.
The Local Boy
Empedocles was from here — philosopher, physician, politician, the four-elements man, and by legend the one who eventually jumped into Etna. The port down the hill is named after him.
Diogenes Laertius records his verdict on his own townsmen. The people of Akragas, he said, live luxuriously as if they would die tomorrow, but build their houses as if they would live forever.
They did both. In 406 BC the Carthaginians came over the hill and it turned out neither one had been the right approach.
What Kongo Removed
Here is the part he has to own up to.
The Valley of the Temples is a working venue. It was August, it was festival season, and there were stages up. Concordia had a platform and a lighting rig in front of it. There were speaker stacks. There was cable, and there were those black road cases that follow a PA around the world.
Mitoraj’s Icaro Caduto — the big fallen bronze that lies in front of Concordia, and which I had every intention of photographing — was backed by a stage and a wall of speakers. So there is no picture of it. Kongo looked at the composition, decided the twenty-first century had won that particular frame, and walked on.
And then, that evening, back in the cabin with the air conditioning going, he opened the files and quietly removed the rest of it. Stages gone. Rigging gone. Two thousand five hundred years of Sicilian sunlight and not a cable in sight.
So. Having spent an entire hot afternoon cataloging four different opinions about how much a man is allowed to fix a ruin — the bishop who converted one, the Englishman who bankrupted himself standing one back up, the nineteenth century that simply invented one, and the modern park that raised a giant on a girder and refused to call it restoration —
Kongo went back to his cabin and produced a fifth.
He is not going to pretend he couldn’t see the logic. He would also do it again tomorrow.
Understanding a rule and enjoying it turn out to be two entirely separate skills. He may have mentioned this before.
Mrs. Kongo Reports
Mrs. Kongo walked two kilometres of unshaded limestone ridge in ninety-eight degrees, in August, without one word of complaint, and has asked Kongo to note for the record that she is owed something.
She is. It is going to be expensive.
Travel safe. Have fun!