Cyzicus Quarries
About
Quarrymen on the hills above Cyzicus cut colored marble and a local granite that the city's noted sculptors' workshops turned into palace fittings, temple elements, and tomb reliefs traded across the Aegean. This is distinct from the separately mapped Proconnesus marble quarries on nearby Marmara Island. Coordinates here mark the general district, not a single surveyed quarry face — no modern archaeological source has pinpointed the exact working face.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
Nearby
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