Doric Temple of Segesta

Doric Temple of Segesta

Sicily 2015

The Doric temple of Segesta was built during the last three decades of the fifth century BC, outside the city walls. It is a large temple periptero hexastyle. On the long side instead presents fourteen columns, 10 meters high. The current state of preservation presents the entire colonnade of the peristyle complete whole entablature. Despite the constructive elements and proportions of the building relate clearly to the classical period of Greek architecture, the temple presents issues on which the debate is open.
The first element of the debate is made by its own nature of artistic expression fully Hellenic, but realized in a city of the Elimi, a population living in Sicily long before the arrival of the Greek colonists who founded the nearby Selinunte, city in perpetual conflict with Segesta . However, it is likely that the designer and the workers employed were Greek, from one of the nearby cities.
The second aspect that has always impressed historians is the absence of vestiges of the cell within the colonnade, which is instead one of the best preserved in the world greek. This got me thinking a Hypaethros or rather to a sacred place without cover and cell and tied to indigenous rituals. Alternatively you thought of a cell entirely wooden structure, as all the coverage, and then lost.
In any case, the temple was never completed, probably because of war events that involved long the city and thus the cell and coverage were never realized. This hypothesis is supported by the lack of grooves of the columns and by the presence, especially on the blocks of crepidoma, of protuberances intended and protect the block during the installation and that would have been chipped off in finishing stage.