The Eleutherna Bridge is an
ancient Greek
Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
corbel
In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal keyed into and projecting from a wall to carry a wikt:superincumbent, bearing weight, a type of bracket (architecture), bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in t ...
arch bridge
An arch bridge is a bridge with abutments at each end shaped as a curved arch. Arch bridges work by transferring the weight of the bridge and its structural load, loads partially into a horizontal thrust restrained by the abutments at either si ...
near the
Cretan
Crete ( ; , Modern Greek, Modern: , Ancient Greek, Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the List of islands by area, 88th largest island in the world and the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, fifth la ...
town of
Eleutherna
Eleutherna (), also called Apollonia
(), was an ancient city-state in Crete, Greece, which lies 25 km southeast of Rethymno in Rethymno (regional unit), Rethymno regional unit. Archaeologists excavated the site, located on a narrow northern ...
,
Greece
Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...
. 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 is a type of carbonate rock, carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material Lime (material), lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different Polymorphism (materials science) ...
blocks in the shape of an
isosceles triangle
In geometry, an isosceles triangle () is a triangle that has two Edge (geometry), sides of equal length and two angles of equal measure. Sometimes it is specified as having ''exactly'' two sides of equal length, and sometimes as having ''at le ...
, 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
The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...
, 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 Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the R ...
, 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 Roman Empire, Romans were the world's first major bridge builders. The following constitutes an attempt to list all known surviving remains of Roman bridges.
A Roman bridge in the sense of this article in ...
References
Sources
*
*
*
Further reading
* Bougia, Polyxeni (1996), "Ancient Bridges in Greece and Coastal Asia Minor", Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania
{{Authority control
Ancient bridges in Greece
Corbel arch bridges
Stone bridges in Greece
Buildings and structures in Rethymno (regional unit)