Spolia, giving stones a second life

Spolia most commonly appear as simple stone blocks or column drums used to quickly and cheaply build larger walls at a later date. 

Ruins from antiquity are readily available quarries used in the construction of city walls, houses, or larger buildings. Basically, and beyond the best-known examples, everything goes from bits of statues, capitals, and reliefs to inscriptions. 

Strolling through the remains from antiquity, we often come across monuments that have been partially dismantled. The larger or heavier pieces are left behind to trigger our imagination to mentally reconstruct the buildings. I have encountered many such examples, mostly in remote regions with little or no control by the authorities. 

Spotting spolia is always very rewarding. One of my first artifacts was a statue of Aegle, the Greek goddess of radiant good health, and an adjacent head in the Byzantine city wall of Dion in Greece. 

Another striking spolia was a list of Greek gods in the back of the mosque of Dodurga, a settlement sitting on top of ancient Sidyma in Lycia. The mosque had been carefully plastered and covered in soft yellow paint but the marble slab, although inserted sideways, was kept in its pristine white marble. Some reverence to the ancient gods, I wonder? 

Recently a spolia in the west facade of the Church St. Anna in Oleveni near Bitola and Florina in the Republic of Macedonia was brought to my attention. It carries a seriously weathered but still readable inscription that has been recognized as a letter by Philip II of Macedonia dated from June 345 BC. It was addressed to the Katlestai, either a military unit or a small mountain community in Illyria. Philip’s whereabouts at that time are obscured by his intense transpopulation of peoples aiming to subdue them and secure his own borders. Hence, it is unclear who the Katlestai exactly were. 

The inscription reads: to those of the Katlestai who stood in battle with Philip the king against the Dardanians and conquered. Here too, a pagan text has been used in a Greek-Orthodox church. 

Especially in the cases of Dodurga and Oleveni the builders either could not read the inscription on the spolia or, if they could, they did not understand it. 

Anyway, precious information is being saved this way for posterity as it is of particular interest to historians and archaeologists alike.