Temple of Bacchus
— — stone the empire forgot to take home.
Not only on a wall.
“The smaller temple at Baalbek, dwarfed only by the ruined Temple of Jupiter beside it. Forty-two Corinthian columns still hold their entablature, and the cella stands almost intact, rare for a Roman temple of this scale. Travellers come in the cool of late afternoon, when the light catches the carved vines along the doorway and the valley behind goes long and gold.
Temple of Bacchus, 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.
Baalbek sits in the Bekaa Valley at roughly 1,170 metres, about 85 kilometres north-east of Beirut. The Romans built their colony of Heliopolis here from the first century BC, and over the following two centuries raised one of the largest temple complexes in the empire. The Temple of Bacchus, completed around 150 AD under Antoninus Pius, is the smaller of the two great temples at the site, though it is itself larger than the Parthenon in Athens. UNESCO inscribed the complex in 1984.
The temple is local limestone, raised on a podium reached by a long flight of steps. Forty-two unfluted Corinthian columns, each about nineteen metres tall, surround the cella; nineteen still carry their entablature. The doorway is the famous detail, carved in deep relief with grapevines, poppies and ears of wheat that have weathered well for nearly two thousand years. A 1759 earthquake brought down part of the colonnade. The rest stayed standing.
The site is open daily as part of the wider Baalbek archaeological park, managed by Lebanon's Directorate General of Antiquities. Most visitors come up from Beirut on a day trip through the Bekaa, about two and a half hours by road. Late afternoon is the photographer's hour. The limestone warms, the columns throw long shadows across the courtyard, and the valley to the east turns gold before the call to prayer rises from the town below.