Skyros Marble Quarries

Marmor Scyrium

QuarryAchaea · Aliko Bay, Skyros, GreeceBuilt 30 BCE

About

Quarries at Aliko Bay and on the small islets of Rinia and Koulouri, off the southern tip of Skyros, produced a colorful tectonic breccia Romans called marmor scyrium. Exports peaked in the 1st century BCE, when the stone reached Rome in enough volume to leave a clear mark in the archaeological record of the Augustan period. Surveys estimate the Rinia quarry alone yielded roughly 8,500 cubic meters of white marble, while Koulouri and Aliko produced the prized brecciated stone. In Rome this breccia became known as breccia di Settebasi, named after the villa near the city where excavators first identified it.

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.