the.com/colossus of rhodes

means A massive bronze statue of the sun god Helios that once stood at the harbor of Rhodes, counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

from Built in the early 3rd century BCE to celebrate Rhodes surviving a siege, the statue was funded by melting down the abandoned siege equipment of the attacker — a nice bit of ancient recycling. It stood only about 54 years before an earthquake snapped it at the knees around 226 BCE, and it lay in ruins for centuries, still astonishing visitors by its sheer scattered size. The enduring myth that it straddled the harbor entrance, ships sailing between its legs, is almost certainly folklore — ancient engineering and the statue's actual pose make that physically implausible. 'Colossus' itself comes from the Greek 'kolossos,' originally just meaning a large statue, and this one was famous enough to fix the word's modern sense of anything gigantic.