Karystos Cipollino Marble Quarries
About
Quarrymen along Euboea's southwest coast between Styra and Karystos cut cipollino, a white marble banded with thick wavy green streaks that Romans called marmor carystium. Some quarry faces still standing there run over 100 meters, evidence of the scale Roman-era extraction reached. Column shafts of Karystian marble traveled as far as Leptis Magna, where builders paired over 400 cipollino monoliths with Aswan granite in the city's forum complex. The green-veined stone also faced Hadrian's Library in Athens and lined the colonnaded main street of Tyre.
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
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