Cathedral of Syracuse

From prehistoric altar to Greek temple to Byzantine church to Baroque cathedral, this site documents the entire religious history of Syracuse across nearly three millennia of continuous sacred use.

Before Syracuse was Syracuse, something sacred marked this ground. The eighth-century BC altar discovered by Paolo Orsi during excavations tells us that the first Greek colonists, arriving around 734 BC, found or created a place of worship here on Ortygia.

The Temple of Athena rose around 480 BC, built by the tyrant Gelon as a thanksgiving offering after Syracuse and its allies defeated the Carthaginian invasion at the Battle of Himera. This was no modest shrine. The temple featured six columns on each short side and fourteen on the long sides, built from local limestone in the Doric order. Its golden shield, mounted on the eastern pediment, became a landmark for Mediterranean navigation.

Cicero, visiting Syracuse in the first century BC, described the temple's treasures, which the corrupt Roman governor Verres would later plunder. The doors were of gold and ivory, the walls covered with paintings of Sicilian kings and cavalry battles. All of this is gone now, but the columns remain.

Bishop Zosimus of Syracuse (649-660 AD) transformed the temple into a church dedicated to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His builders walled up the spaces between the columns, converting the peripheral colonnade into solid walls while preserving the columns themselves. The naos became the nave. The cella became the chancel. The pagan temple became a Christian church without demolition.

Subsequent centuries added and subtracted. The Normans built a facade that fell in the earthquake of 1693. Andrea Palma designed the current Baroque front between 1728 and 1753. But the essential form, the temple-become-church, remained unchanged.