Those giant columns standing in the open field are what's left of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Fifteen are still standing out of a hundred and four, and at about fifty-five feet, they're the tallest columns on any Greek temple anywhere. Find the big cluster where stone beams still run across the tops, joining the columns together. For a long stretch of this city's history, somebody lived up there.
First, the building, quickly. It was started in the sixth century B.C. by a family of tyrants who wanted the biggest temple in Greece. It was abandoned when the tyrants were thrown out, and restarted centuries later by a Syrian king. It was abandoned again when he died, raided for parts by a Roman general who shipped some of the columns off to Rome, and finally finished by the emperor Hadrian, about six hundred and thirty-eight years after it was begun. It stood complete for barely a century before earthquakes, invasions and lime burners went to work on it.
Which brings us to the roof. Some
time in the Middle Ages, a Christian hermit climbed onto the tops of those columns and decided to live there. He was following a tradition called the stylites. They were holy men who lived on top of pillars, to get as far from the world as they could while staying where the world could see them. The first famous one, a monk named Simeon in Syria, spent more than thirty years on top of a pillar, pr
