Baalbek and the trilithon

A 1,650 tonne cut block still lying in the quarry, never moved

Baalbek lies east of the Litani River in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, about 67 km northeast of Beirut, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon at 1,150 metres. Its history goes back at least 11,000 years. After Alexander the Great took the city in 334 BCE it was renamed Heliopolis, the sun city, and under Rome its sanctuary drew thousands of pilgrims to a triad of essentially Phoenician gods, worshipped as Jupiter, Venus and Mercury. Built up over more than two centuries, it became one of the most celebrated sanctuaries of the ancient world, and UNESCO, which listed it in 1984, calls it one of the finest examples of Imperial Roman architecture at its apogee.

The Temple of Jupiter stood at the western end of the Great Court, raised another 7 metres on a platform 47.7 by 87.75 metres and reached by a wide staircase, and was circled by 54 unfluted Corinthian columns 20 metres high. The Romans built it on top of earlier ruins formed into a raised plaza of twenty-four monoliths, the largest weighing over 800 tons, and under the Byzantines the temple was also known as the Trilithon, from the three massive stones in its foundation. Already damaged by earthquakes, it was demolished under Theodosius in 379 and its stones reused for a basilica. The neighbouring Temple of Bacchus is richly decorated, with a monumental gate sculpted with Bacchic figures, and the Round Temple, or Temple of Venus, stands out for its refined, harmonious form.

The quarry, Hajar al-Hibla, holds the block known as the Stone of the Pregnant Woman. In the summer of 2014 a team from the German Archaeological Institute led by Jeanine Abdul Massih of the Lebanese University found a sixth, much larger stone underneath and beside it, measuring around 19.6 by 6 by 5.5 metres and estimated at 1,650 tonnes, suggested to be the largest ancient block in the world.

Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany passed through on 1 November 1898 on his way to Jerusalem and noted both the magnificence of the Roman remains and the drab condition of the town. In 1902 Baalbek became a station on the railway between Riyaq and Aleppo. Today it is the capital of Baalbek-Hermel Governorate and home to the Baalbek International Festival, though its tourism has been hit by the civil war of 1975 to 1990, spillover from the Syrian war and the Israel-Hezbollah conflict since 2023.