Delphi

Delphi is over-visited by day trips. The standard Athens itinerary brings guests in by bus at 11am, takes them round the sanctuary at the worst possible hour and has them gone by 3pm. The site deserves better. Drive up the evening before and sleep in Arachova or in the small village of Delphi above the site. Arrive at opening, 8am in summer, on a fresh morning when the only sound is the wind and the cicadas in the cypresses. The change is total.

The ancients called Delphi the omphalos, the navel of the world, and marked it with a sacred stone in the inner sanctuary. The Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, gave prophecies from a chamber above a crack in the rock from which fumes rose. Modern geological analysis has found ethylene and methane vapours in the spring water beneath the temple, which would account for the priestess’s reported altered state. Whether or not the vapours are the explanation, no significant decision in the ancient Greek world was made without first consulting the oracle.

The Sacred Way zigzags up through the sanctuary. It passes the foundations of treasuries (small marble strongrooms where rival city-states displayed their offerings) and the Temple of Apollo with its inscribed maxims, then climbs to the theatre and the stadium higher up the slope. Allow two hours on the site itself. The Charioteer of Delphi is in the museum at the entrance. This almost perfect bronze of the early classical period survives from a fifth-century BC chariot dedication. It is one of the very few original ancient Greek bronzes to survive; most we know through Roman copies in marble. Do not skip the museum.

The Castalian Spring runs at the foot of the Phaedriades cliffs above the site. Ancient pilgrims washed here before consulting the oracle. The water has been diverted away from the original fountain, but the gorge is dramatic and worth the short walk. Stay one night, possibly two if you want to walk the trails up to the Korykian cave or the village of Kastri.

House Notes

  1. The address

    Santa Marina Arachova sits on the slope above the village, with 20 suites, two villas (Villa Delphi and Villa Eniochos) and the Ōsme Spa under the same roof. It is the mountain sibling of Santa Marina Mykonos, built by Elias Papageorgiou on a property facing Mount Parnassos. It is the pedigree address for a client arriving the night before the site.

  2. The olive grove

    The plain below Delphi holds the Amphissa olive grove: 5,500 hectares from Amphissa down to the Corinthian Gulf, between the villages of Erateini and Kirra. It has approximately 1,200,000 trees, and seven in ten are over 150 years old. The ancient path to the sanctuary ran through it, and the modern road still does. Time the descent for the late-afternoon light.

  3. The Tholos

    Below the main sanctuary lies the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, the gateway to Delphi for ancient pilgrims, and within it the Tholos. Theodorus of Phocaea raised this small circular building in 380 to 370 BC. It originally carried 20 Doric columns outside and ten Corinthian semi-columns within, and three reconstructed Doric columns remain standing today. Many day-trip groups skip the short walk down.

  4. The Sphinx

    The Sphinx of the Naxians, from around 560 BC, is a colossal marble figure on a column of six drums. The column is crowned with one of the earliest Ionian capitals (the carved top of a column) at the sanctuary, and the monument originally stood 12.45 metres high. The Naxians dedicated it to Apollo at the peak of their archaic wealth. Fragments first surfaced in 1860 and the rest in 1893, and it is now displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi.

  5. The European Cultural Centre

    Konstantinos Karamanlis founded the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in 1977, under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Its grounds run to 100 acres on the slope below the village. They hold a conference centre, a guesthouse, a sculpture park of contemporary European works and an open-air theatre seating 1,000. The International Meetings on Ancient Drama have run since 1985.

  6. The Athenian Treasury

    The Athenian Treasury stands on the first turn of the Sacred Way, below the Temple of Apollo. It is the earliest Doric treasury built entirely of Parian marble, raised by the Athenians after 490 BC in thanks for Marathon. The metopes (the carved panels above the columns) on the building are reproductions, and the originals are in the museum at the gate. It is the one strongroom on the climb to read closely before the temple.

  7. Hosios Loukas

    Hosios Loukas is the Byzantine detour east of Delphi, near Distomo on the slopes of Mount Helikon. The hermit Loucas Stereiotis founded it in the mid-tenth century. Its smaller Theotokos church is the earliest known four-column cross-in-square in Greece. The larger Katholikon, dated 1011 to 1012, is the earliest surviving domed octagon and holds the best preserved mosaics of the Macedonian Renaissance. It has been UNESCO-listed since 1990.

  8. Galaxidi

    Galaxidi is an eighteenth-century merchant marine town on the Corinthian Gulf, south-west of Delphi. Its Nautical & Historical Museum, the oldest of its kind in Greece, occupies the 1870 town hall on Mouseiou & Stavrou Niarchou Street. It covers 5,000 years of local naval life and holds the largest collection of Greek sailing-ship paintings in the country. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 3pm. Stay for dinner on the harbour afterwards.

  9. The kitchen

    Dasargyris, on Delfon 56 in the centre of Arachova, has kept the same kitchen for close to a century. It is the address for ribs, kokoretsi (spit-roasted offal), kontosouvli (spit-roasted pork) and the slow-cooked casseroles the mountain village lives on in winter. Service is in a single rustic hall beside the fireplace, and the menu does not stretch beyond meat done well. Book ahead from February to April, when Athenians come up to ski.

  10. The Stadium

    The Stadium of Delphi lies at the highest point of the sanctuary, above the theatre, between the Phaedriades and the hill of Agios Ilias. It is the best preserved in Greece, with a track 177 metres long and seating for around 6,500. Most groups turn back at the theatre and never make the last climb, though the Sacred Way carries on up to it. Go in the early cool, before the heat settles in the gorge.

Mythology

  1. Apollo

    Apollodorus says the goddess Themis gave oracles at Delphi before Apollo killed its guardian, the serpent Python, and took it over. The temple there showed his arrival and held both his statue and the omphalos, a sacred stone.

  2. Charon

    In the Knidian Lesche at Delphi, Polygnotus painted Charon as an old man at the oars on Acheron, carrying two named figures in his boat. Pausanias describes the scene and traces it to an older passage in the lost epic Minyas.

  3. Gaia

    Gaia stands at the start of two ancient accounts of the oracle at Delphi. Aeschylus names Earth as its first prophet, while Pausanias records a tradition in which Earth shared the oracle with Poseidon before giving her part to Themis.

  4. Hesiod

    The ancient traveller Pausanias records a tradition that Hesiod was barred from the oldest contest here, the singing of a hymn to Apollo, because he had not learned to accompany his own singing on the harp.

  5. Hestia

    A Homeric Hymn places Hestia at Delphi, tending the sacred house of Apollo. No excavated building there is securely identified as the Delphic prytaneion, and a foundation once given that name is now thought to have had another purpose.

  6. Iapetus

    Apollodorus has Deucalion, son of Prometheus and grandson of Iapetus, drift nine days in a chest and land on Parnassus, the mountain Delphi sits on, where he repeoples the earth from stones. Pausanias tells the Delphian half of it: the oldest city on that ground was overwhelmed in the same flood, and the survivors who followed the howls of wolves to the summit founded Lycoreia.

  7. Mnemosyne

    Mnemosyne is a working cult name at the oracle of Trophonius at Lebadeia, the modern town of Livadia, in the Herkyna gorge east of Delphi across Boeotia. Pausanias, who travelled Greece and wrote down what he was shown, has the inquirer drink Mnemosyne’s water before the descent and sit on Mnemosyne’s throne on the way up, where the priests ask him what he saw.

  8. Mount Parnassus

    Mount Parnassus holds Delphi between the Phaedriades cliffs, with the Corycian Cave higher on its slopes and the summits of the rites above it. Apollodorus also makes the mountain the place where Deucalion and Pyrrha came to land after the flood.

  9. Pan

    Above Delphi, the Corycian Cave was sacred to its nymphs and above all to Pan. Excavation in 1970 to 1971 found more than 25,000 animal knucklebones, which point to divination and small offerings in the cave.

  10. Pausanias

    Pausanias gives most of Book 10 to Delphi, including seven chapters on paintings by Polygnotus that once hung in the Lesche of the Cnidians, beyond the spring Cassotis (10.25.1). The paintings have not survived in any form, so his description is the only full record of them. Excavation has tested the sanctuary against his account since 1892.

  11. Phoebe

    In the opening prayer of Aeschylus’s play the Eumenides, Phoebe receives the seat of the oracle at Delphi from Themis without force and gives it to her grandson Apollo as a birth gift. Pausanias records a different line of holders that leaves her out.

  12. Pindar

    Pythian 4 answers Arcesilaus of Cyrene’s chariot win at the Pythian Games and ties its story of the Argonauts to the oracle Battus received from Delphi. Pausanias later recorded an iron chair inside Apollo’s temple and the Delphic tradition that Pindar used it when singing or composing for the god.

  13. Plutarch

    Plutarch held a priesthood of Pythian Apollo here, and set three dialogues inside the sanctuary: one seated by the temple with strangers who were leaving Delphi, one on a walk through the dedications that ends in the portico south of the temple with the Castalian spring in view, and one at a meeting of two travellers before the Pythian games. The same walk records a temple of the Muses that stood beside the source of the water drawn for sacrifice.

  14. Python

    The Homeric Hymn places the dragon Apollo kills beside a spring below Parnassus and explains the Delphic name Pytho through the rotting of its body. Apollodorus names that guard Python and makes the killing the moment Apollo takes the oracle from Themis.

  15. The Castalian Spring

    Euripides has Delphi's temple servants bathe in the Castalian Spring before they enter the sanctuary of Apollo, and Pausanias calls its water sweet to drink and pleasant to bathe in. The first fountain house at the spring dates to 600 to 590 BC and the second, cut whole from the rock, to about the first century BC.

  16. The Corycian Cave

    The Corycian Cave opens high on Mount Parnassus above Delphi and was sacred to Pan and the Nymphs. Herodotus records the Delphians carrying their possessions into it before the Persian advance, and excavation begun in 1970 found that people used it as far back as the Neolithic period.

  17. The Corycian Nymphs

    The Corycian Nymphs were worshipped with Pan in the Corycian Cave on Mount Parnassus above Delphi. Excavation begun in 1970 confirmed the cave’s long use, including its time as their sanctuary.

  18. The Delphic Oracle

    The oracle at Delphi was given by the Pythia, who spoke in an underground space beneath the cella of Apollo’s temple that only priests might enter. Herodotus describes the most famous consultation there: Croesus of Lydia was told that if he sent an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire, and the empire turned out to be his own.

  19. The Moirai

    Inside Apollo’s temple at Delphi, Pausanias saw statues of two Moirai. Zeus Moiragetes and Apollo Moiragetes, each named as a guide of fate, stood beside them in place of the third.

  20. The Muses

    Plutarch records a shrine of the Muses at Delphi, beside the spring whose water served the sacrifices, and says the Delphians kept three Muses named Hypate, Mese and Nete after the intervals of the lyre. The two hymns inscribed on the Treasury of the Athenians, now in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi, call the Muses from Helicon to the twin-peaked Parnassian rock and the waters of Castalia.

  21. The Omphalos

    The Omphalos was the stone Delphi held to be the navel of the earth, and it stood in the inner room, or cella, of the temple of Apollo beside the statue of the god. Pausanias describes it as white marble, and Strabo, who treats the story as a fabrication, reports that two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world met above the spot.

  22. The Pythian Games

    The Pythian Games belonged to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. Their contests used several places on the sacred land, including the theatre and the surviving stadium above the temple, and their earliest remembered form was a hymn sung to the god.

  23. The Sphinx

    The Naxians raised this marble sphinx on an Ionic column beside the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi around 560 BC. It is the same winged, woman-headed type as the Theban monster, and over 12 metres tall with its column and base. An inscription of the fourth century BC on the base renews the Naxians’ right to put a question to the oracle ahead of other visitors. The statue now stands in the Delphi Archaeological Museum.

  24. The Theogony

    The Theogony is the earliest surviving text to fix Cronus’s stone to this ground. It has Zeus set the stone “fast in the wide-pathed earth at goodly Pytho under the glens of Parnassus, to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men” (Theogony 497-500). Pytho is the sanctuary that Pausanias and other ancient writers call Delphi.

  25. Themis

    Aeschylus makes Themis the second holder of the seat of the oracle at Delphi, after Gaia and before Phoebe. Pausanias records another tradition in which Earth gives her share of the oracle to Themis, who passes it straight to Apollo.