Akrocorinth Travel

Akrocorinth
The steep rock of the Acrocorinth rises to the south-west of ancient Corinth, surmounted by the fortress, also called the Acrocorinth, which was the fortified citadel of ancient and medieval Corinth and the most important fortification work in the area from antiquity until the Greek War of Independence in 1821. It is 575 m. high and its walls are a total of almost 2.000 m. in length.
Courses of roughly dressed polygonal masonry allow us to suppose that the Acrocorinth was fortified as early as the time of the Kypselid tyranny (late 7th c. early 6th c. BC). The surviving parts of the ancient fortifications, however, which are at many points beneath the medieval enceinte, belong mainly to the 4th c. BC. In 146 BC, Mummius destroyed the fortifications of the lower city and the acropolis. The destroyed sections were subsequently reconstructed from the same ancient material in Late Roman times.
This fortress contains ruins from Byzantine, Roman, Turkish and Venetian rule and offers excellent views from the Temple of Aphrodite, which crowns Acrocorinth.
The fortress of Acrocorinth stood, and stands, on a limestone hill 575m above the sea, which is but 5,000 m distant. It commanded the overland route from Northern Greece into the Peloponese and from the Adriatic Sea to the Agean Sea. A Greek and then a Roman town developed on the plain below the hill. This was succeeded by the medieval town which was vacated after an earthquake in 1858. The Greek town has largely disappeared but the Greco-Roman has been excavated. According to Vitruvius, the Corinthian Capital was invented here.
For garden historians, the most interesting aspect of the site is the Sacred Well and the Fountain of Peirene. Pausanias (Book 2, 3-2) wrote about the façade ‘with chambers made like grottoes, from which the water flows into a basin in the open air’. The rectangular basin and the grottoes survive. He also wrote that Peirene ‘was a woman who was turned into a spring of water by tears she shed in bewailing her son Kenchrias, whom Artemis had unwittingly killed’. The grottoes were used for drawing water. When the Romans rebuilt Corinth they placed a new façade, with doric columns, in front of the Greek façade. It was then modified in Byzantine times.