Castello Eurialo

When the Athenian expedition attacked Sicily between 415 and 413 BC there was as yet no fortress on the height called Euryalus, but the ground already mattered: Thucydides names the place in his account of the first Athenian assault on Syracuse. The Athenians took the hill at the outset and could not keep it, and that failure to hold it stopped them from besieging the city below to any effect. Later in the same account, after the Syracusans had won Epipolae back, a Syracusan garrison is mentioned on the site.

It was in light of that experience that Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, first fortified the height. Building ran from 402 to 397 BC on the highest point of the Epipolae plateau, about 120 metres above sea level and some seven kilometres north-west of Syracuse, and the fortress was meant to protect the city against siege or attack by the Carthaginians.

The fortress was not left as Dionysius finished it. Renovations followed under Agathocles and under Hiero II, undertaken in response to the advance of siege weaponry; among those advances was the siege technique Demetrius Poliorcetes introduced at Rhodes in 305 BC.

The approach was cut by three ditches with a fourth on the flank. The first is 6 metres long and 4 metres deep; 86 metres beyond it a second runs about 50 metres, covering a forward bastion; behind that a third, 17 metres across and 9 metres deep, ties the defences into the tunnels, with a drawbridge at its southern end and an internal stair climbing out of it. The fourth ditch guarded the shallowest part of the lateral slope of Epipolae and was linked to the third by underground passages.

Between the ditches stood the central stronghold, closed on the ditch side by five square towers — the pentapylon — probably about 15 metres high, crenellated, and fitted with fourth-century BC rainwater spouts carved as lions' heads, now kept in the Museo Paolo Orsi in Syracuse. The towers were most likely platforms for catapults, and three large cisterns beside the stronghold held water against a siege. Beyond it a wall roughly 5 metres thick carried the entrance — the tripylon, so called because it was made up of three gates — and linked the whole complex to the Dionysian walls of the city.

Much of the design worked by concealment. The galleries let defenders move from one part of the fortress to another without being seen from outside, and gave many places to hide men for an ambush. The ditches on the northern side are visible only from very close, so that in a rapid assault attackers stood in real danger of going over the edge and being killed by the sentries. The gate was laid out to limit frontal attack and the charge of a battering ram, with the walls cutting the line of sight towards it.

Syracuse fell to Rome in 212 BC, taken by Marcus Claudius Marcellus, and the fortress went on being modified long afterwards. The alterations continued into the Byzantine period, when, with Muslim invasion threatening, parts of the complex were torn apart so that the rest could be repaired with the salvaged material.

King Victor Emmanuel III came to the monument on an official visit in 1939. Two years later, in the Second World War, the artefacts of the Syracuse archaeological museum were loaded onto mules, carried up to the fortress and hidden in its tunnels so that they would be safe from aerial bombardment.

The site is designated Italian national heritage and is run as an archaeological park with a museum. Its antiquarium opened on 30 September 2016, after a long closure that followed the Santa Lucia earthquake of 1990, and holds finds from the fortress including a sword, a helmet and the stone shot of a catapult.