Temple of Poseidon at cape Sounion
— — sixteen columns the sea kept.
Not only on a wall.
“A white marble temple on the cliff at the southern tip of Attica, about 70 km south of Athens by the coastal road. Built around 440 BC on the ruins of an earlier shrine the Persians sacked at Salamis. Sixteen of the original thirty-four Doric columns still stand on the headland the sailors used as their last sight of home. — from the studio
Temple of Poseidon at cape Sounion, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cape Sounion is the southern promontory of Attica, where the Saronic Gulf meets the Aegean, about 70 km south of Athens by the coastal road. The temple stands on a 60-meter cliff at the cape's tip, inside Sounion National Park. The cape is named in Homer's Odyssey as the place where Menelaus buried his helmsman Phrontis on the journey home from Troy. The site is administered by the Greek Ministry of Culture.
The temple of Poseidon was built around 444 to 440 BC under Pericles, on the foundations of an earlier sixth-century shrine the Persians destroyed under Xerxes in 480 BC. Its Doric columns are cut from local Agrileza marble and stand 6.1 meters tall. They are fluted with sixteen flutes rather than the usual twenty, to slow the salt-wind's erosion of the edges. Sixteen of the original thirty-four columns still stand; the architect is generally credited as the same hand as the temple of Hephaestus in the Athenian Agora.
The cape is best near sunset, when the Agrileza marble takes the late light from honey to rose and the Aegean opens westward toward Aegina and the Peloponnese. Lord Byron visited in 1810 and carved his name on the base of one of the northern columns; the inscription is still visible. He set the cape in Don Juan with the line that begins 'Place me on Sunium's marbled steep.' The site closes at dusk, varying by season; the parking and approach trail are short and unshaded.