Out of the ordinary - Olympia

the long rectangle on the right is the stadium

The Summer Olympics start today, and this made me flash back to our trip to Greece 2 1/2 years ago.  We made a stop at Olympia, site of the ancient games.  Did you know the games took place for over 1100 years??  What will we ever build that lasts that long?  These games were over 700 years old before Christ was born!  We ran into that feeling a lot in Greece, particularly in Athens...  The Greeks started the games in 776 B.C., the Romans took over at some point in time, and Christianity ended it all in 393 A.D.(it was a festival honoring Zeus, after all).



See the start and finish lines?



No one knows why the games started or why they were held every four years.  What we do know is that the entire Greek world observed a truce to let athletes and spectators - all men - to get to Olympia.  Apparently this was broken only a few times in all those centuries.  People came from Italy and Asia Minor - tremendous distances 2500 years ago.  One legend says Herakles - Hercules to us - initiated them after he finished the 12th of his labors - the cleaning of the Augean stables.  He paced off the length of the stade (that's where stadium comes from!) and then ran the entire 192 meters without taking a breath.  When the games began, this was the only contest, and it remained the most prestigious, with each Olympiad named after the winner.  Leonidas of Rhodes won four times in a row in the second century B.C.  Over time, they added more games.  Wrestlers couldn't break fingers, but eye-gouging was OK.   Go figure.  No silver or bronze winners, either.  Women couldn't participate or even attend - the penalty was death.  I have no idea why.  The only way women had any involvement was if they were very rich and owned a horse entered in a race.  In non-Olympic years, women had games honoring Hera, Zeus's wife.

 It poured the day we were there - one of our few days of really foul weather - and the stade was pretty flooded, so we couldn't run it.  But we got ready to, as did everyone else we saw.  We attached ourselves to the end of a great tour that gave us lots of information we wouldn't have gotten from the meager signage (that seems to be pretty typical in Greece - even Greek signage is pretty minimal).  We learned that the Greeks never bothered to pipe water to the site.  With thousands in attendance, I can't imagine what it was like with scarce water!   But the Romans - typically - wanted their comforts and built aqueducts to bring in water from miles away.



looking away from the stade

Athletes entered the stadium through this tunnel.  Right before the tunnel were a bunch of statues of Zeus.  But victors didn't put them there.  Instead, those caught cheating had to pay to have one erected!  Practice areas included a gymnasium and swimming pool.  The former even had a covered track, twice the length of the stade!  The Greeks took these games seriously.  By the way, the word gymnasium derives from a Greek word meaning "to train in the nude."  Yep, athletes trained and competed nude.

  

Here's where they light the Olympic flame.  After being buried under 3 feet of silt for centuries, Germans began excavating in 1852.  They're not done yet.  It was so amazing to be right where they light that torch.

A few more shots: the top one is the temple of Zeus.  The one bright standing column in the distance was reerected for the 2004 Olympics (which took place in Athens).  The builders decorated the temple with gold, red and blue paint, and Zeus's 43 foot statue of gold and ivory sat on a throne of ivory and ebony!  It was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and was built right on site.

The lower shot shows some of the training areas.