Keywords
Olympia, Olympic Games, ancient Greece, Niki Vlahou, Greek mythology, history, sports, cultural significance, religious sanctuary, tourism
Summary
In this conversation, Monique Skidmore and Nikki Vlahou explore the historical and cultural significance of Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympic Games. They discuss the origins of the Games, the religious importance of Olympia, and the key attractions that visitors can see today. The conversation also touches on the decline of the Olympic Games and the lasting legacy of Olympia in modern Greece.
Takeaways
- The Olympic Games were held in Olympia from the 8th century BCE.
- Olympia served as a religious sanctuary and athletic center.
- The Games were known as the Olympiad and occurred every four years.
- Olympia was chosen for its accessibility and neutral ground for city-states.
- Young men trained for both sports and military skills in ancient Greece.
- Winning the Olympics was the highest achievement for young athletes.
- Olympia features ruins of gymnasiums and temples significant to ancient Greeks.
- The Games officially ended in 393 AD due to religious and political changes.
- Olympia is a source of pride for modern Greeks and a popular tourist destination.
- Visiting Olympia can change one’s perspective on history and culture.
Sound Bites
“Olympic Truce”
“Olympia is absolutely flat”
“the Hill of Cronos”
Timeline
00:00 – Introduction
02:23 – Nike, the Goddess of Victory
03:15 – The Serene Landscape of Olympia
04:01 – The Hill of Chronos
05:02 – Olympia as a Religious Center
05:51 – The Olympic Games
07:36 – The Role of Young Men in Ancient Greece
09:20 – Highlights of Olympia
13:17 – The End of Olympia
15:10 – The Modern Significance of Olympia
15:58 – Conclusion
Transcript
Introduction (00:00)
Stephen Parker: Welcome to the Take Me to Europe podcast with your host, cultural anthropologist Monique Skidmore.
Monique Skidmore: Hello travelers, today we’re off to experience a religious sanctuary that became the site of the most famous physical event in human history: the Olympic Games. We’ll be talking with Nikki Vlahou of Niki Olympic about this famous site to understand why the Olympic Games were held here, what the games were, and why they were such a big deal to the ancient Greeks.
When you arrive in Olympia, you might be wondering where Mount Olympus is. The answer is a long way away. Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, is the highest mountain in Greece, part of the Olympus mountain range in the north of the country. The archaeological zone of Olympia is in the Peloponnese, where many of Greece’s classical era ruins are found, beginning as a religious sanctuary with an awesome Temple of Apollo and about 70 other buildings from the 8th century BCE.
A series of athletic events known as the Olympic Games were held here. People came to compete from right across the Greek world. The Games were known as the Olympiad because they were held every four years. The Greek city-states sent their athletes to Olympia under what came to be known as the Olympic truce.
Modern day advertizers, I think, would be proud of the range of add-on experiences that occurred during the Olympiad: poetry, sculpture, painting, songs, religious sacrifices, economic and political deals, and military alliances were in evidence during the festival period.
The Olympic Games started as a running or foot race but came to include 20 events at any one Olympiad. As an equestrian, I love that, although women weren’t allowed to compete in the Games, only free men were, they made an exception for female charioteers and I would have loved to have been one of them!
So let’s join Nikki Vlahou now and learn some more about the ancient Olympic Games and the ruins of Olympia.
Nikki, welcome to the Take Me To Europe podcast. You’ve got an interesting name. Can you tell us who you’re named after?
Nike, the Goddess of Victory (02:23)
Nikki Vlahou: First of all, hi to everyone, and thank you for having me here. I am named after the ancient goddess of victory, Niki, if you prefer a more American pronunciation of the name.
Monique Skidmore: Can you tell us about your childhood summers and their connection to Greek mythology?
Nikki Vlahou: Yes, actually, I was lucky enough to be brought up by a grandmother who, as bedtime stories, would always tell me different stories about Greek mythology, about the Cyclopes, about Ulysses, and that fascinated me so much.
Monique Skidmore: You’ve visited lots of ancient sites or famous monuments around the world. What can you tell us about the site of Olympia?
The Serene Landscape of Olympia (03:15)
Nikki Vlahou: I actually chose to work more, actually settle in Olympia for a few years and live and work locally, because I always found the landscape there much more interesting, much more serene.
Greece is a country which is full of mountains everywhere, and most of the ancient sites were built on places where they wouldn’t be easily attacked. So they usually chose hills and steep mountains and places that would not be easy to access, and still, in some cases, it’s not that easy to hike all the way to the top.
On the contrary, Olympia is absolutely flat and it’s built in between two rivers on the slopes of a beautiful hill. So every time I go to that site I feel an energy coming in from the soil of this sacred place and I enjoy very much walking through it, with all the ruins around coming to life.
The Hill of Kronos (04:01)
Monique Skidmore: And it’s not just any hill, though, that it’s backing onto, is it?
Nikki Vlahou: There is one specific hill. There are many, but there is one specific hill that has always had a very big significance to people the hill of Kronos, with a K.
Kronos, the father of the gods, the one who swallowed his kids so that none of them would take over his throne like he had previously done to his father, Uranus, the sky.
And, according to the Greek mythology, it was Zeus, his last son, who was saved and who was secretly brought up in Crete. So he came back and overthrown Kronos, revived his brothers and sisters, and for the ancient Greeks, that hill, among other things, had a very sacred significance because it was where the gods got saved.
Olympia as a Religious Center (04:45)
Monique Skidmore: And speaking of Zeus, Olympia had its origins as a religious centre, and I can’t think of another religious centre, though that’s become the premier site in the world for athletes.
So what was its religious importance and what can we still see at Olympia from its time as an important religious sanctuary?
Nikki Vlahou: Actually, Olympia started as a religious centre combining some sort of an athletic character. Many, many centuries it was the only place that combined so beautifully both the religious and the athletic character of it. Then, over the passage of time, athletics won a little bit more over other things, but it never, ever stopped having a very, very big importance religiously for greek people.
It was some sort of a mecca for the ancient Greeks, because this was where Zeus was born, this was where the gods were born. So the people from all over the country and from the colonies were dreaming that they could visit once in their lifetime, either as athletes to compete or as people who would come for pilgrimage and would get the favour from the gods just showing up.
The Origins of the Olympic Games (05:51)
Monique Skidmore: Can I ask you, then, about the Olympics? It’s the main reason tourists visit the site, so let’s talk about the Olympic Games that began in 776 BCE. How did they come to be held at Olympia?
Nikki Vlahou: They had the story about Zeus and the hill of Kronos, giving them that important religious significance and making them all want to travel.
But the truth is that, having decided to start the Olympics in order to bring all Greeks in one common and neutral ground like Olympia, was they needed to find a place that would be the less difficult and the less dangerous to access and the less close to other important city-states, because the country was separated in city-states and it was pretty frequent that they wouldn’t get along with one another and they would have long-lasting civil wars.
Best example that everyone in the world knows has been Sparta and Athens, two Greek city-states that were not very many times getting along with each other. They chose the area that was far away from both of those cities but at the same time was in the valley, so they would have easy access, coming on foot or on horses, very close to the sea.
So they would come on ships from the colonies and the islands In between the two rivers, which was also giving them easier access and some sort of a way to follow a map, to follow a GPS, to follow the rivers that were both meeting at the one edge of the site, coming space and food from the valley, so it was a beautiful.
It is a beautiful still area but combined so many good reasons to have a successful organization starting there, such as the Olympic Games.
Monique Skidmore: I suspect that, in order to understand the significance of Olympia to the ancient Greeks, though, that in order to understand the significance of Olympia to the ancient Greeks, though, you’d have to understand the status and the role and the responsibilities of young men in Greece.
The Role of Young Men in Ancient Greece (07:36)
Nikki Vlahou: Yes, young men in Greece. Of course, it has to do with which city we are talking about each time, because not all cities had exactly the same rules, but, for example, in sparta, young boys would leave the house from the age of eight and live in the camps with their gymnasts and the rest of the cities.
It wasn’t that area that they would start doing that, but back in the ancient times, and in a country that has always been very important and in a geographic position that always made it have a lot of threats of attacks from different parts of the Mediterranean and around the world, they needed to be able to defend themselves, and to defend themselves.
Back then, they didn’t have airplanes and nuclear weapons or cannons or anything like that. They would need to have strong soldiers. All the fights would be body to body, so they needed to have strong soldiers, which would be the young boys that started training from a very young age on learning how to have battle skills, at the same time that those battle skills could be used for them to perform sports in the actual Olympics.
But the oxymoron, an amazing thing, was that at the same time, they were teaching them how bad war is. So they were trying to make them be very capable and good soldiers, but also make them realize that the war is a very bad thing and you only do it when you don’t have a choice, and actually the best way to have peace is to be always ready for war.
There was no higher accomplishment in life than to be an Olympic winner, so they would desperately want to take part in those games, to be good enough to be selected by their cities to participate in those games and, of course, to win, which would sort of demify them.
Monique Skidmore: Indeed, they were celebrated through the eons, weren’t they? In their individual city states?
Nikki Vlahou: True, true.
Highlights of Olympia (09:20)
Monique Skidmore: What are the main things that travellers to Olympia should see?
Nikki Vlahou: Olympia is a very beautiful site, although it’s full of ruins right now. It’s a site that expands in an area of about 70 acres. When you first arrive and you enter the holy grounds of Olympia, you get to see the area where the athletes used to train.
So we still have the foundations and in some cases, some restored columns of the two different gymnasiums, which were the schools for the body and the mind.
So there were the areas where the athletes would train locally, the same as they had done for a long time before arriving back home, and then, in the open courtyards, they would do intensive training for the events they were specializing in the nude. In the nude, by the way, in Greek is called gymnos and that’s where the word gymnasium comes from.
So I always take my visitors through the gymnasiums and try the best I can to help them picture that place, not only with everything standing, but also with all those young boys there sweating and running and wrestling or training and in general doing their best to stand out amongst all those other athletes that had arrived there.
There is the Prytaneion, the building where the priests lived and where there was some sort of an Olympic flame burning. Nothing to do with the lighting of the Olympic torch we have today, but there was an eternally burning flame in an area where everyone was coming in and coming out from, so all people should see.
Right next to it stands out the very beautiful Tholos, the round building that King Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, had built after he had united all of Greece. So it’s a quite significant historically but also architecturally building, of course, very impressive.
The two major temples we have, the very first one was a temple that was dedicated to Hera, the queen of the gods, the wife of Zeus, and that’s actually where we light the Olympic torch today, in front of it. So I always take my guests to the exact spot and try to help them visualize how, from the sun and only, the torch is being lit right there every time we have the modern Olympic Games.
The temple of Zeus is massive and although just one column of it has been restored, it’s fascinating for people to see all those massive drums and capitals, the way they tumble down and the way they kind of look like a domino still around the foundation of the temple.
In that temple stood one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the golden ivory statue of Zeus.
And then what I find absolutely fascinating is that we still have hundreds of bases of statues of the Olympic winners with inscriptions, original writings, on them.
The statues are gone for different reasons, but we get to see how many of those statues would be there and how impressive it would be for a visitor to see these statues and to realize how many have made their dreams come true and have really become immortals by putting their statues right there with our names on the bases.
Right across from them, though, we have the names of the cheaters inscribed on bases of other types of statues of Zeus. That’s quite an interesting point. They made what you get if you win, what you get if you cheat – fame and shame.
The stadium of Olympia was very simple and very impressive, and that’s the way it still is. It didn’t have actual seats. It’s an amphitheatrical artificial area of ramps of earth where 45,000 people could be seated all together and watch the games, the sports happening.
In the centre of it we still have the original starting and finish lines, and it’s an absolutely incredible place to close your eyes and visualize all those men competing.
The End of Olympia (13:17)
Monique Skidmore: I’ve been visualizing a really awful thing actually, Nikki, the end of Olympia, because it didn’t just end. So many ancient sites were destroyed at a particular time in ancient Greek history. Can you tell us about that time? And then what happened to Olympia?
Nikki Vlahou: The Olympic Games actually lasted for 1,200 years. So just thinking of that is incredible, is miraculous. How many things and how many places got continuously organized the same type of thing they were famous for for 1,200 years.
But all things that go up at some point start going down. So before the sanctuary was destroyed, the Olympics had already started to decline.
In the late centuries of the life of Greece and of Olympia, Greece was a Roman colony, so the games were being organized by the Romans and even Roman athletes could participate.
So a lot of things had changed. And much, much later, when the Romans accepted Christianity in 393 AD, there was a very fanatic Christian Roman Emperor. Emperor Theodosius thought that worshiping those gods was wrong anyway, that it was idolatry.
But he also believed that all of those pagan sites such as Olympia or Delphi and other sites in ancient Greece should be demolished. And that was what he did. He took all of the treasures and all of the precious things out of Olympia and set it on fire, which basically was the reason why people left.
The buildings had no roofs left after the fire, so they couldn’t really be used anymore. So the Games officially ended in 393 AD and after that we had earthquakes, we had floods, we had mudslides and gradually all of the site was buried under mud and had a very good rest under the mud until the archaeologists discovered it in the 1900s.
Modern Significance of Olympia (15:10)
Monique Skidmore: Well, as you said, Nikki, the Olympic Games were held at Olympia for almost 12 centuries, but now they haven’t been held there for 1600 years. Does Olympia mean anything to Greeks today?
Nikki Vlahou: It means a lot, if I shouldn’t say it means everything. We are very, very proud of the fact that the Olympic Games started in our country. We always refer to all those ideas and principles that they were teaching the young boys, the young athletes, and we kind of try to make our kids, to make our students, follow some of those ideas.
Today, the truth is that almost every Greek visits Olympia as often as he can. No matter how far he comes from, he will want to go and walk into that beautiful stadium. I think it’s a must-visit place, and after you leave it, you’re going to change the way you think about certain things.
Conclusion (15:58)
Monique Skidmore: Well, look, I’ve been fascinated today to learn about this Panhellenic site that played such a critical role in Greek unity, community, and social life and helped form Greek identity. I’d like to thank our expert tour guide, Nikki Vlahou, from Nikki Olympic Tours.
Stephen Parker: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Take Me to Europe podcast. Hop onto our website, takemetoeuropetours.com and sign up to our newsletter to learn more about Europe’s hidden and most exciting destinations, and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast series.
