Filitosa

On a low hill above the Taravo valley in southern Corsica, among olive trees and maquis, stone warriors stand in the grass. Their faces are carved in low relief — hollow eyes and mouths, a jutting nose and chin — and some carry swords or daggers on their chests. These statue-menhirs of Filitosa, made in the Bronze Age, belong to the distinctive Corsican group of statue-menhirs, and the site where they stand was occupied from the Neolithic into the Middle Ages.

The hill, about 128 metres long and 40 wide, is known locally as Turrichju, "the place of towers". It was covered in maquis and taken to be the ruin of an old convent until 1946, when the landowner, Charles-Antoine Cesari, reported his find; the British writer Dorothy Carrington helped bring it to wider attention, and the archaeologist Roger Grosjean excavated here from the 1950s to 1972. The earliest occupation goes back to around 3300 BC. In the Bronze Age the hilltop became a fortified settlement, or castellu: a wall of huge boulders enclosing about 6,000 square metres, with a stone tower at each end and, in the middle, a circular central monument surrounded by oblong houses with curving granite walls. The western tower still keeps several ground-floor rooms and the start of a staircase that once led to an upper floor.

When the central monument was excavated, its walls turned out to contain forty-five fragments of monoliths, among them thirteen statue-menhirs that had been broken and reused as building stone. Grosjean believed the statues had been raised against invaders he called the Torreans, who then toppled them and built them into their own towers; later archaeologists have questioned this story, and the date and reason of the destruction are still debated. The statues themselves are powerful works: massive, sometimes almost geometric silhouettes, faces clearly modelled, shoulders and shoulder-blades shown, a spine incised down the back of some and even ribs on one. Filitosa V carries a dagger, Filitosa I and VI long swords, and the rounded heads are thought to show helmets. Some of the statues now displayed were brought here for safekeeping from other sites in the Taravo valley, and the row of megaliths at the foot of the hill, set around an ancient olive tree near the quarry from which the stones were cut, is a modern arrangement.

Getting there

Filitosa is on the D57 road near the commune of Sollacaro, north of Propriano in Corse-du-Sud. Ajaccio is about 22 km away in a straight line; Ajaccio Napoléon Bonaparte Airport (AJA) is about 20 km away.