Olympia

Olympia is in the western Peloponnese, a long way from where most travellers begin a Greek trip. Athens is four hours away by car, and Nafplio two and a half. Most visitors come for a single long day and leave, which is the wrong way to do it. Stay a night in Olympia town or up the coast at Katakolo. Walk the ruins in the late afternoon, when the buses have gone, see the museum the next morning, and drive on.

The Games began here in 776 BC and ran for nearly 12 centuries, until the emperor Theodosius I banned pagan festivals in 393 AD. The sanctuary, the Altis, was the walled ground in which the temples and altars stood. The Temple of Zeus held Phidias’s statue in gold and ivory (chryselephantine), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Only the outline of the floor and a few column drums remain. The Temple of Hera, older and smaller, is where the modern Olympic flame is still kindled with a focusing mirror before each Games. The Philippeion, a small circular monument that Philip II of Macedon built to mark his victory at Chaeronea, is one of the more architecturally distinguished buildings on the site.

Walk down the Sacred Way, through the vaulted entrance tunnel and out into the stadium. The pale limestone starting blocks are still in place, worn at one corner. The embankments held about 40,000 standing spectators. Stand on the line and look down the track.

The Archaeological Museum holds the pediment sculptures from the Temple of Zeus and the Hermes of Praxiteles, one of the few surviving original works by a named ancient sculptor. The face is well enough preserved to read its expression. The smaller Museum of the Olympic Games of Antiquity, in the village, is often empty and worth a short visit. Stay two nights, with a long lunch in between.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Kalamata airport is 90 minutes south by car, and the motorway from Athens takes four hours. Yacht guests berth at Katakolo, the small Ionian port that once served the sanctuary. Most visitors come for the day from Messinia rather than stay overnight in the village.

  2. The address

    Costa Navarino, in Messinia, is the nearest base of real standing, with the Romanos and the Mandarin Oriental in the same development. Olympia is an hour and a half’s drive north. The village around the sanctuary has small inns and guesthouses, which suit an overnight stop rather than a stay.

  3. The Heraion

    The Temple of Hera, north of the Temple of Zeus below the foothills of Mount Kronios, was raised around 600 BC and is the oldest monumental stone temple at the sanctuary. Its columns began in wood and were replaced in stone over the centuries, so no two of the surviving drums and capitals quite match in diameter or fluting. The temple once kept the disk of Iphitos, inscribed with the Sacred Truce, and the Olympic flame is kindled at the altar before it.

  4. The marble

    The Hermes of Praxiteles, a statue in Parian marble 2.13 metres tall, was found on 8 May 1877 in the cella, the inner chamber, of the Temple of Hera by Ernst Curtius’s German mission. The face is intact. The raised right arm, which once held a bunch of grapes for the infant Dionysus, is not.

  5. The workshop

    The Workshop of Phidias, south of the Altis (the sacred precinct), was excavated by the German Archaeological Institute between 1954 and 1958. Its interior, 15 by 32 metres, matches the cella of the Temple of Zeus, where the gold and ivory statue would stand. The find most often quoted is a small Attic cup with ‘Φειδίου εἰμί’, “I belong to Phidias”, scratched on its base.

  6. The grove

    The heart of Pierre de Coubertin rests in a stele in a planted grove on the slopes of Kronos Hill, brought to Olympia in 1938 on his own instruction. The grove is on the grounds of the International Olympic Academy, ten minutes’ walk from the sanctuary, and is on the published Tour of Ancient Olympia route.

  7. The forest

    Foloi, the oak forest 30 kilometres north-east of the sanctuary, is mostly Hungarian oak (Quercus frainetto), at around 690 metres above the Erymanthos foothills, and is protected as Oropedio Folois under Natura 2000, the European network of protected sites. It is named for Pholos, the centaur who sheltered Heracles during the hunt for the Erymanthian boar. An hour among the trees is worth the drive.

  8. The estate

    Mercouri Estate was founded in 1864 at Korakochori by Theodoros Mercouri, 3 kilometres inland from Katakolo and 32 from the sanctuary. Its signature red is the estate’s Refosco clone, planted from northern Italy in the founding decade and naturalised here since. The fourth and fifth generations of the Kanellakopoulos family now hold the cellars.

  9. The springs

    Kaiafas Lake, 20 kilometres south of Olympia, has the warmest sulphur springs in the western Peloponnese, at 32 to 33 degrees in the open-air curative pool and the 14 private baths under cover. The lake, 3 kilometres long and just over 2 metres deep, appeared with the earthquakes of the sixth century AD. The hydrotherapy season runs from June to October.

  10. The Syngreion

    The Museum of the History of the Olympic Games of Antiquity is housed in the Syngreion, the 1880s neoclassical building that was the site’s first museum. It reopened on 24 March 2004 with around 400 objects drawn from across Greece. It is rarely crowded and the right place to end the visit.

Mythology

  1. Zeus

    Olympia was one of the main sanctuaries of Zeus. His temple there, built in the fifth century BC, held the sculptor Pheidias’s huge statue of gold and ivory, and the Greek traveller Pausanias describes an outdoor altar built from the ash of offerings with no cut stone.

  2. Hermes

    At Olympia, the statue known as the Hermes of Praxiteles stood in the Temple of Hera, the sanctuary’s earliest temple, rather than in a shrine of Hermes. There the god of crossings and thresholds stood among the treasures of another god’s house.

  3. Atlas

    Atlas stood twice in the sanctuary at Olympia, both times at the moment Heracles comes for the golden apples: on a carved panel of the Temple of Zeus, and on the cedar chest the Cypselids dedicated in the temple of Hera. The chest has not survived; the temple’s panels are in the large central hall of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia.

  4. Eileithyia

    At the foot of Mount Cronius, the Eleans worshipped Eileithyia Olympian and chose her priestess every year. Her sanctuary also housed Sosipolis, a local protector in the form of a child, cared for by an elderly priestess.

  5. Gaia

    Pausanias saw an ash altar of Earth at Olympia on the place called the Gaeum. He also records the local claim that an oracle of Earth had stood there in earlier times.

  6. Ganymede

    The Archaeological Museum of Olympia holds a large clay group of Zeus carrying Ganymede to Olympus. It was found nearly intact in the Stadium area during the 1878 excavations and is dated to about 470 BC.

  7. Hector

    The Achaeans dedicated here a group of statues of the Greeks who dared to cast lots to meet Hector in single combat, armed with spears and shields near the great temple, with Nestor opposite them on a second pedestal holding the helmet the lots were shaken in. Nothing of the group survives, and Pausanias already found eight figures where there had been nine.

  8. Hestia

    Olympia’s Prytaneion held the sacred hearth of the Eleans, and its fire burned by day and night. Pausanias says its ashes were taken to the ash altar of Zeus, linking the civic fire to the sanctuary’s main sacrifice.

  9. Kronos

    Olympia kept the memory of Kronos as an earlier ruler through stories of the Golden Race and the childhood of Zeus. Pausanias records a sacrifice each spring by priests called the Basilae on the top of Mount Cronius, above the sanctuary.

  10. Nike

    Paionios’s Nike stood high on a pillar at Olympia, paid for from war spoils by the Messenians. The inscription does not name the defeated enemy, and Pausanias records rival accounts of which victory the statue celebrated.

  11. Nyx

    Pausanias saw Nyx on the Chest of Cypselus in the temple of Hera at Olympia. She held two sleeping children, one white and one black, whom inscriptions named as Sleep and Death.

  12. Oceanus

    Hesiod makes every river a child of Oceanus and Tethys and names the Alpheus second in the list, and Olympia stands in the valley made where the Alpheios and the Kladeos meet. Pausanias records an altar in the Altis, the sacred enclosure, where the Eleans sacrificed to Alpheius and Artemis together, and a second altar to the river alone.

  13. Pausanias

    Books 5 and 6 cover only Olympia, room by room around the Altis. Excavation, begun there in 1875, has matched some of what Pausanias listed and left the rest unconfirmed: of the 15 treasuries he names (6.19.1), only five are securely identified, and of the gold-and-ivory Zeus by Pheidias he describes at length (5.10.2), nothing survives beyond its image on coins of Elis.

  14. Pindar

    Olympian 1 calls itself a song for Hieron of Syracuse’s win in the single-horse race at Olympia in 476 BC. Pindar sets that win beside the race of Pelops and his worship at the sanctuary, so Olympia is the occasion and sacred ground of the poem, not a passing mention.

  15. Rhea

    At Olympia, the Metroon, built early in the fourth century BC, housed the worship of the Mother of the Gods, known there as Rhea or Cybele. The temple placed the mother of Zeus inside the sanctuary ruled by her son.

  16. Selene

    In the account Pausanias gives from Elis, Selene loves Endymion, who sets his sons a race at Olympia with the kingdom as its prize. The people of Elis also pointed out Endymion’s tomb beside the runners’ starting place in the stadium.

  17. Tethys

    Hesiod gives the rivers of the earth to Tethys, and names the Alpheus second in that list, after the Nile. Olympia stands in the valley made where the Alpheios and the Kladeos meet, and Pausanias records in the Altis an altar where the Eleans sacrificed to Alpheius and Artemis together, with a second altar to the river alone standing not far from it.

  18. Thanatos

    Pausanias saw Death and Sleep on a cedar chest dedicated here by the descendants of Cypselus of Corinth: two children, one white and one black, asleep in the arms of Night and named by inscriptions. He describes the chest inside the temple of Hera, which stands in the Altis, the walled sanctuary at Olympia.

  19. The Ancient Olympic Games

    The ancient Olympic Games were held within the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia. The surviving stadium, its starting line, the Bouleuterion and the wider Altis keep the separate places where competitors registered, officials judged and the contests took place.

  20. The Centauromachy

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia carried the Centauromachy across its west pediment, carved in Parian marble around 476 to 457 BC. The Archaeological Museum of Olympia holds the surviving sculptures from the temple’s pediments.

  21. The Ceryneian Hind

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia showed the Ceryneian Hind among its carved Labours. Parts of the hind and Heracles from its broken panel survive in Olympia, with two small original pieces in the Louvre; a head and torso used in the old reconstruction belong instead to the Amazon panel.

  22. The Cretan Bull

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia carried Heracles's capture of the Cretan Bull among its metopes. The Louvre holds Ma 716, the surviving upper two thirds of the Parian-marble panel, with Heracles's arms and the bull's head missing.

  23. The Erymanthian Boar

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia carved the live boar arriving before Eurystheus, as one of its series of labours. Four fragments of the original panel are in the Louvre, with parts of Heracles and Eurystheus and the boar’s snout.

  24. The Heraia at Olympia

    The Heraia was run at Olympia in the Olympic stadium itself, on a course shortened by about one sixth for the maidens, and the winners took a crown of olive and a share of the cow sacrificed to Hera. Pausanias links the games to the temple of Hera he describes just before them, which the Eleans said the people of Scillus built and whose rear chamber still had one pillar of oak when he saw it.

  25. The Labours of Heracles

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia carries all twelve labours on its metopes, six above the front porch and six above the back porch, but the description of them by Pausanias ends on the cleaning of the Augean stables and never mentions Cerberus. Pausanias also records two traditions about the first games at Olympia that do not agree, one crediting an earlier Cretan Dactyl also named Heracles, the other crediting Heracles son of Amphitryon, who held them again after conquering Elis.

  26. The Nemean Lion

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia showed the Nemean Lion at one end of its carved series of labours. The only surviving original fragment, a piece of Parian marble showing the dead lion and part of Heracles, is in the Louvre (Ma 718).

  27. The Oath at Olympia

    The Olympic oath was sworn at Olympia in the Council Chamber, on slices of boar’s flesh, beside a statue of Zeus Horkios holding a thunderbolt in each hand. Pausanias also saw the bronze Zanes along the road to the stadium, paid for with the fines of athletes who had broken the rules, and read the inscription saying that an Olympic victory is won by swiftness of foot and strength of body and not by money.

  28. The Stymphalian Birds

    The Temple of Zeus at Olympia showed the Stymphalian Birds among its carved labours. Three original fragments of the panel survive in the Louvre, showing Athena seated and parts of Heracles, with traces where metal birds once completed the scene.

  29. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia

    The Temple of Zeus stood inside the Altis, the sacred grove of Olympia, and carried three sets of sculpture: Pelops and Oinomaos on the east pediment, the fight of the Lapiths and Centaurs on the west, and the Labours of Heracles on the metopes. Pheidias made its lost statue of Zeus in a workshop opposite the temple.

  30. The Titanomachy

    Pausanias reports the tradition of Elis that Cronus was worshipped on the hill above the sanctuary before Zeus was, and that some at Olympia said Zeus and Cronus settled the throne there by wrestling, not by the war Hesiod tells. Archaeologists have found signs of worship at the foot of that hill, the Hill of Cronus, from a time before Zeus was worshipped in the sanctuary.