Full Day To Olympia

The first stop is on the bridge over the Corinth Canal, about an hour out of Athens. Six kilometres cut through solid limestone between 1881 and 1893, up to 79 metres deep and only 24 metres wide at the surface — too narrow for anything modern, so ships pass through under tow.

The idea is far older. In the 7th century BC Periander of Corinth priced a canal, decided against it, and built the Diolkos instead: a paved stone trackway across the isthmus with grooves cut into it, along which ships were hauled from one sea to the other on wheeled cradles. It worked for centuries, and sections of it survive beside the modern cut. Nero started the canal in 67 AD with six thousand Jewish prisoners and got a tenth of the way across before he died. Everyone else waited eighteen hundred years.

Olympia was a sanctuary in a river valley, empty for three years out of every four, and for five days in the fourth it held the largest gathering in the Greek world.

The Games began in 776 BC — that is the first victor Greek historians could name, and they dated everything else from it. The Sacred Truce guaranteed safe passage to anyone travelling to them; city-states at war with each other stopped, or paid a fine in silver to Zeus. The text was engraved on a bronze disk kept in the Temple of Hera.

The first Games had one event: the stade, a sprint of about 210 yards down the length of the track. The word for the track was stadion. That is where “stadium” comes from, and you can walk the original one — the track is still there, with the stone starting sills still set in the ground and room for forty thousand spectators on the earth banks around it.

The Temple of Zeus (470–456 BC), by the architect Libon of Elis, was the largest temple in the Peloponnese and the model of what a Doric temple should be. Inside it stood the statue of Zeus by Phidias — twelve metres of gold and ivory, seated, head nearly touching the roof — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. It was taken to Constantinople in late antiquity and burned in a fire there. Nothing of it survives.

But Phidias’s workshop does. It was excavated just west of the temple, built to the same dimensions as the cella so he could work the statue at full scale. It was later turned into a church.

The Temple of Hera is older than all of it — around 600 BC, one of the oldest monumental temples in Greece. By the Roman period the Eleans had turned it into a museum for the sanctuary’s treasures.

Between the two temples stood the Altar of Zeus, and it was made of ash. Every four years a hundred oxen were sacrificed — a hecatomb — and the ash was mixed with water from the Alpheios and packed onto the altar. By the second century AD it stood seven metres high. Archaeologists dug through the layer.

The women had their own games. The Heraia, in honour of Hera, were organised by sixteen women of Elis and run in the same stadium: foot races for unmarried girls, with an olive crown for the winner, exactly as at the Olympics — from which women were barred entirely.

And the Games were not always noble. In 67 AD Nero entered the four-horse chariot race with a team of ten. He fell out during the race. He was declared the winner.

One of the best archaeological museums in Greece, and small enough to do properly.

The pediments of the Temple of Zeus are here, reassembled: the chariot race of Pelops on one end, the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs on the other, with Apollo standing in the middle of the chaos with his arm out, entirely calm. It is one of the great images of classical sculpture and it is in a room you can stand in.

The Hermes carrying the infant Dionysus was found in the Temple of Hera, where Pausanias said it would be, and where he attributed it to Praxiteles. The Nike of Paionios flew down from a nine-metre pillar in front of the temple.

And there is one of the most important bronze collections in the world — helmets, griffins, votives, including the helmet of Miltiades, dedicated here after Marathon with his name scratched on it.