Megara Hyblaea was a Greek colony in Sicily, in the territory of present-day Augusta. It was founded in 728 BC by colonists from Megara: Thucydides relates that, led by the founder Lamis, they stopped first at Trotilon, today's Brucoli, then at Leontini and at Thapsos, and finally, after the death of Lamis, settled here at the suggestion of Hyblon, a chief of the Sicels, from whom the city took its second name. A century later it in turn founded Selinus, at the other end of the island. Around 483 BC Gelon of Syracuse took it after a long siege: he moved the richest citizens to Syracuse and sold the others as slaves. Refounded by Timoleon after the middle of the fourth century BC, it was destroyed during the Second Punic War by the troops of the consul Marcellus, and was never rebuilt.
What to see
No modern town was built over the city, and for that reason it keeps its original urban layout: in the mid-seventh century BC it was organised on a regular plan, with an agora that is one of the earliest known. On the site you can see the agora with the remains of two porticoes, the Hellenistic baths, the heroon, the prytaneum, the remains of the walls, those of a Hellenistic temple and the foundations of an archaic temple, a metalworking shop and dozens of houses.
What is visible comes mostly from the post-war excavations, led by the Frenchmen Georges Vallet and François Villard and the Italians Luigi Bernabò Brea and Gino Vinicio Gentili. The finds are in the Paolo Orsi regional archaeological museum in Syracuse: among them a kouros torso, a theatrical mask of the sixth century BC and the polychrome Megarian pottery.
Visiting
The site lies next to industrial plants and is reported to suffer from a lack of maintenance: opening, times and the condition of the area should be checked before going, on the website of the Sicilian Region.
Our editors' tip
The best-known piece from Megara is not here but in Syracuse: the Kourotrophos, an archaic limestone statue of an enthroned mother goddess. It was found on 30 October 1952 in pieces, 936 fragments, after a pneumatic drill passed through during the excavations for the refinery, and was put back together one by one by the Paolo Orsi museum. As early as 1867 the Catania-Syracuse railway had cut the site in two.
