Doric temple of Segesta, Ancient Greek temple in Calatafimi-Segesta, Sicily, Italy.
The Doric temple of Segesta is a peripteral hexastyle temple of local travertine limestone, with six unfluted columns on the short sides and fourteen on the long ones, thirty-six in all, about 9.33 m high. The stylobate measures roughly 26 × 61 m on a three-stepped crepidoma. The whole peristasis, architrave and pediments survive, but there is no central naos, and the inner walls and upper structure are rough exposed stone.
Construction began around 417 BC, on a site already sacred since about 500 BC, while Segesta was allied with Athens. The building is generally held to be unfinished, perhaps because the city fell under Carthaginian rule at the end of the 400s BC. In the 18th century the royal architect Carlo Chenchi carried out a first restoration, and Goethe's visit made the temple a stop on the Grand Tour.
A Greek inscription on a calcarenite base, 75 cm long and 21 cm high, kept in Calatafimi's municipal library, names Diodorus son of Tittelo, who dedicated a statue of his sister Minyra, priestess of Aphrodite Urania. Found near the temple, it points to the goddess worshipped here. The names Diodorus and Tittelo are common at Segesta.
The temple stands on a hill west of the ancient city, outside its walls, and is reached on foot; the ground is grass and gravel on a slope. The surviving peristasis, architrave and pediments are intact, so the colonnade can be walked around. The site lies in the archaeological area of Calatafimi Segesta, in the province of Trapani.
In 2020 the park director announced a Greek inscription found near the temple, now in Calatafimi's municipal library: a 2nd-century BC calcarenite base, 75 cm long, on which Diodorus, son of Tittelo, dedicated a statue of his sister Minyra, priestess of Aphrodite Urania. It points to the deity worshipped here.
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