Olympia

We traveled on to the town of Olympia, where the ancient Olmypic games took place quadrennially for over 1100 years. These games were the ancient world's biggest sporting event. Warring states suspended hostilities in order to send their athletes. Wealthy sponsors vied to outdo each other, victorious athletes won great fame, and could parlay their feats of strength and speed into a considerable fortune. It sounds very familiar, except women (and slaves) were not allowed to participate. Any woman who even attempted to attend was hurled off a nearby rock if she was caught.

The festival lasted five days, and events included wrestling, chariot and horse racing, the pentathlon (wrestling, discus and javelin throwing, long jump, and running) and pankration, a vicious form of fisticuffs in which the only prohibited tactics were biting and eye-gouging (except in Sparta, were eye-gouging was allowed). Writers, poets and historians read their works to large audiences. The citizens of various city-states got together, drank wine, clinched business deals, and occasionally settled their differences without resorting to the battlefield. The ancient games were last held in 394 AD, when the emperor Theodosius I decreed their end as they were a "pagan" festival.

The site today is much visited by tourists, so we arrived early in the morning. We were rewarded by having the ruins of the ancient stadium to ourselves for the first 20 minutes.Within the stadium, the start and finish lines of the 120 metre sprint track still survive, as do the judges seats. The stadium could seat 45,000 spectators.

It was thrilling to walk the very path that the athletes took so long ago, and enter the olympic staduim through the arched tunnel, of which only one span remains. As an incentive for honest competition, the athletes had to walk by a row of statues of Zeus on their way to the tunnel. The cost of the statues had been paid from the heavy fines levied on athletes who had been caught cheating in previous games, an object lesson which subsequent athletes were supposed to find obvious.

The site also contains the ruins of many buildings that were important to the games. The stone remnants of a gymnasium where wrestlers and pentathletes trained is the first ruin encountered on entering the site. The most imposing ruin is that of the Temple of Zeus, which was destroyed by two earthquakes in the 6th century AD, after having stood for more than 1000 years. The huge round fluted pillars, made up of massive blocks of limestone perhaps two metres in diameter and well over a metre thick, were knocked over like stacks of dominoes, and remain where they fell 1500 years ago.

We spent the morning looking at the many ruins, and imagining the grandeur of the buildings in their heyday. We saw the spot where the Olympic flame is lit every four years, to be carried to the city hosting the games.

In the afternoon, we went to the archaeological museum, where the famous statue of Hermes carrying the infant Dionysis is kept. We saw many artifacts and sculptures that had been found at the olympic site, including the magnificent western pediment from the Temple of Zeus, showing the fight between the Centaurs and the Lapiths.

The modern town of Olympia is unabashedly a tourist town. The main streets are lined with stores selling souvenir t-shirts and trinkets of all kinds, bars, and restaurants. Fortunately for Barb, we did find a book store that sold English language novels, including some impenetrable and turgid Greek fiction translated into English. We also managed to find a taverna on a side street near our pension that served fine home cooking, Greek style.

We spent the night in a cheap and cheerful pension, and then set off for Kalamata.