Full Day To Delphi

Delphi’s other argument is the view. The sanctuary looks out over the olive grove of Amfissa, which runs unbroken down to the sea at Itea — and on the way back the road passes through Arachova, a stone village on the Parnassos slope, better known in winter than in summer.

A ten-hour private tour to Delphi, the place the ancient Greeks held to be the centre of the world, with a stop on the way at the Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites — Delphi inscribed in 1987, Hosios Loukas in 1990. We collect you from your hotel in Athens early in the morning and bring you back to the door.

The road runs north-west out of Attica into Boeotia, and after about two hours reaches the ground where Helicon and Parnassos face each other across the plain. Hosios Loukas is built into the western slope of Helicon, behind its own walls. A hermit called Loukas of Steiris settled here in the early tenth century; he died in 953 and lies in the crypt, beneath a church he did not live to see finished. Inside the Katholikon are gold-ground mosaics untouched since the eleventh century — the best-preserved programme of their kind left in Greece. Most day trips to Delphi drive past the turning.

From there the road climbs. Delphi sits on the southern flank of Parnassos, on a shelf of rock above a ravine, and you see it long before you arrive. Zeus, the story goes, released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth; where they met he marked the centre of the world, and a stone — the Omphalos, the navel — was set here on the spot.

The sanctuary grew around the Temple of Apollo, and inside it the Pythia gave the god’s answers in verse for the priests to interpret. For roughly a thousand years no Greek state made a serious decision without asking here first. The Sacred Way climbing to the temple is lined with the treasuries the city-states built to hold their offerings — piety and public accountancy in the same marble. The oracle’s last recorded answer came in about 393 AD, when Theodosius I ordered the pagan sanctuaries closed. It had been in business for a millennium.

The Omphalos is in the archaeological museum now, along with the Charioteer of Delphi — cast in bronze around 470 BC, buried by a landslide, and dug out in 1896 with his enamel eyes still in place. Almost every large Greek bronze was eventually melted down for the metal. This one survived by being lost.