Quezi

Baalbek - (notice the size of the man standing by the third column from the left) - courtesy deutsch_laender - CC-BY

This ancient Phoenician city, where a triad of deities was worshipped, was known as Heliopolis during the Hellenistic period. It retained its religious importance during Roman times, when the sanctuary of Jupiter attracted thousands of pilgrims.

Baalbeck became one of the world’s greatest and best preserved Roman sites.  It is the largest complex of Roman temples ever built. Its columns are the tallest ever erected and its stones the largest ever used. Baalbek can be counted among the wonders of the ancient world.

The Baalbeck Acropolis encompasses the Temples of Bacchus, Venus and Jupiter.

The largest of the three temples was sacred to Jupiter Baal.  The architrave’s blocks weigh up to 60 tons each, and the corner cornice blocks over 100 tons, all of them raised to a height of over 75 feet above the ground.  The temple was on a platform which was stabilized by retaining walls on three sides. These walls are constructed of 24 monolithic blocks at their lowest level, each weighing approximately 300 to 400 tons. The western retaining wall has a second course of monolithic blocks containing the famous “trilithon,” a row of three stones, which are about 750 tons each.

At the southern entrance of Baalbeck is a quarry where the stones used in the temples were cut. A huge block, considered the largest hewn stone in the world, still sits where it was cut almost 2,000 years ago. It weighs an estimated 1,000 tons.

The Temple of Bacchus, in front of the Temple of Jupiter, is much better preserved due to spending the centuries buried in rubble. A smaller temple, the Temple of Venus, supported by six granite columns, adjoined the Temple of Jupiter.

When Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 AD, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine closed the Baalbeck temples. At the end of the 4th century, Emperor Theodosius tore down the altars of the Jupiter temple’s Great Court and built a basilica using the temple’s stones. The remnants of the three apses of this basilica can still be seen in the upper part of the stairway of the Temple of Jupiter.

“Baalbeck, with its colossal structures, is one of the finest examples of Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee”, UNESCO stated in making Baalbek a World Heritage Site in 1984.

For more information about ancient Rome