The Eleutherna Bridge is an
ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
corbel arch bridge near the
Cretan
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, an ...
town of
Eleutherna
Eleutherna ( grc-gre, Ἐλεύθερνα), also called Apollonia
( grc-gre, Ἀπολλωνία), was an ancient city-state in Crete, Greece, which lies 25 km southeast of Rethymno in Rethymno regional unit. Archaeologists excavated the si ...
,
Greece
Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...
. A similar second bridge standing a short distance south of it collapsed toward the end of the 19th century, with only very few traces remaining.
Description
The well-preserved structure has a single span of 3.95 m, which is quite large for a
false arch. The opening is cut from the
unmortared limestone
Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...
blocks in the shape of an
isosceles triangle, the height of which is 1.84 m. The overall length of the bridge measures 9.35 m. Its width varies from 5.1 to 5.2 m, with the structure converging slightly towards its center point above the arch (5.05 m width there). The height is between 4 and 4.2 m.
History
The bridge, which is still in use, was first described by the Englishman
T.A.B. Spratt in his ''Travels and Researches in Crete'', after he had paid a visit to the site in 1853. At the time, another ancient bridge with a triangular arch was still standing a few hundred metres away, but, judging from a later report, was destroyed some unknown time before 1893.
Date
While there is general agreement that the two bridges of Eleutherna date to the pre-
Roman period, a more precise dating is hampered by the lack of proper finds. According to Nakassis, the extant, northern bridge was built sometime during the
Hellenistic period
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...
, while the Italian scholar Galliazzo dates the construction more precisely to the end of the 4th or beginning of the 3rd century BC. For the smaller, now collapsed southern bridge Nakassis cautiously supports a late
Classical date.
See also
*
List of Roman bridges
This is a list of Roman bridges. The Romans were the world's first major bridge builders. The following list constitutes an attempt to list all known surviving remains of Roman bridges.
A Roman bridge in the sense of this article includes an ...
References
Sources
*
*
*
Further reading
* Bougia, Polyxeni (1996), "Ancient Bridges in Greece and Coastal Asia Minor", Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania
External links
{{Commons-inline
Ancient bridges in Greece
Corbel arch bridges
Stone bridges in Greece
Rethymno (regional unit)
Buildings and structures in Crete