Temple C, or the temple of Athena, today better known as the Doric Column, was a Greek temple of the Doric order built in the first half of the fifth century BC inside the acropolis of Gela. Dedicated to Athena, it was built about fifty metres east of Temple B to commemorate the victory at the battle of Himera and to celebrate the power of the Deinomenids.
What to see
Today some foundation blocks and one column 7.75 metres high remain, studied by the archaeologist Paolo Orsi and raised again by Pietro Griffo between 1948 and 1951. The temple stood at the end of the eastern hill of the acropolis, in a strategic position from which the sea, the river and the plain of Gela can still be seen; it was oriented east-west and built of stone from the Gibil-Mut quarries on Mount Zai. Its plan has been reconstructed as that of a hexastyle peripteral temple, with six columns on the front and fourteen on the long sides, measuring 51.30 by 21.70 metres. It must have been one of the largest and most sumptuous temples of the Western Greek world, and was one of the few in Sicily with almost all its architectural cladding and roof tiles in marble from the Cycladic islands; the columns, of humbler material, were plastered white to avoid a sharp colour contrast with the marble crowning.
It was badly damaged in 405 BC, during the battle of Gela. In the Arab period it was still recognisable and its columns stayed standing at least until the first half of the thirteenth century, when Guido delle Colonne attributed the remains to Hercules. In 1233, when Frederick II refounded the city, the temple began to be used as a stone quarry and gradually vanished: by the sixteenth century all the columns but one had been pulled down. In 1732 a certain Ignazio Greco carried off four hundred blocks from the foundations; the column fell around the middle of the eighteenth century in a storm and was later restored and raised again by Griffo. The hundreds of votive statuettes found in the shrines on the north side confirmed the attribution to Athena.
Visiting
The temple stood in the acropolis of Gela, the archaeological area of Molino a Vento, and the column can be seen on the eastern hill. The sources consulted give no opening hours or access arrangements: check them with the Parco archeologico, on the website of the archaeological parks of the Sicilian Region, or with the Comune.
Our editors' tip
The Arabic name of the river Gela, wâdi âs sawârî, that is «river of the columns», recalls precisely the columns of this temple, which the geographer al-Idrisi saw still recognisable.
