George Zongolopoulos (1903–2004) was one of the most significant Greek sculptors of the twentieth century, a man who went on to represent Greece eleven times at the Venice Biennale and whose work defined Greek modernism across six decades. But in the early 1950s, when the competition for the Zalongo monument was announced, he was still building his reputation. The national contest was launched in May 1953, after Preveza schoolteacher George Sakkas had first proposed the idea in 1950 and a fundraising drive — run largely through Greek schools — had gathered 500,000 drachmas. The examination board considered proposals from architects and sculptors across the country. Zongolopoulos won, paired with architect Patroklos Karantinos. Both offered their supervision without pay.

Construction began in July 1954. There were no paved roads to the summit, no cranes. Every bag of sand, every load of gravel, every limestone block — 4,300 of them, each measuring 40 by 30 by 25 centimeters — was carried up by hand, until an improvised hoisting mechanism could be rigged. Each spring and summer for six years, Zongolopoulos and his wife, sculptor Eleni Paschalidou-Zongolopoulou, traveled by military vehicle to the mountain and worked for three or four months at a time. Citizens from the nearby village of Kamarina helped. Greek military forces helped. The marble craftsman Eleftherios Giftopoulos oversaw the technical stonework. The result — six figures, 13 meters high, arms linked across 18 meters of clifftop — was unveiled on June 10, 1961, with political and religious leaders in attendance. The inscription on the east base names the three men responsible for building it. It does not name the women it was built to honor.

Zongolopoulos chose abstraction deliberately. The six forms are not realistic women; they are not weeping or dramatic or posed for effect. They hold hands and they face outward and they offer nothing that can be called comfort. The choice of abstraction was important in 1961, when Greek official culture tended toward the heroic and monumental, and it remains important now. The monument does not tell you how to feel. It stands at the edge where the women stood, and it asks you to reckon with the place itself. From the clifftop, on a clear day, the Ionian Sea is visible to the west and the Ambracian Gulf glitters to the southeast. The distance to the ground below is the kind that makes the choice, whenever you think about it clearly, almost impossible to hold in your mind.

Around 30,000 people climb the 410 steps every year. The municipality of Preveza organizes the Zalongeia — a celebration held each summer in the central square of Kamarina, the village at the mountain's foot. Between 2008 and 2013, the municipality worked with the George Zongolopoulos Foundation to restore and maintain the monument, which faces the particular challenge of standing exposed on a cliff edge at 700 meters in all weathers. The monument's survival through more than six decades is itself a kind of statement: the community below kept climbing the steps, kept raising the money, kept caring for the concrete and limestone on the summit. Some places are held in place not by permanence but by continued attention.