In Olympia we had a nice guided tour of the museum and temple ruins. We learned the truth of the not so old torch ceremony, and pretended to race each other across the finish line (I won of course!).
Starting with our tour of the museum we realized it was very helpful to have a guide. We couldn’t have understood as much as we did if we didn’t have one. We saw offerings to the gods from anyone and everyone who wanted to watch or play in the games 3000 years ago. An animal dragged there to kill as sacrifice was the usual offering, but toy sized bronze horses were also common. Bigger, more expensive bronze things were melted down in the subsequent years, though there was one larger solid bronze horse we had the pleasure of seeing. The biggest pieces in the museum’s collection were the two decorated pediments from the back and front of the temple to Zeus. The craftsmanship was very impressive and detailed with each side portraying a story. One side was telling a story of revelry and motion and one telling the story of Pelops and of the king who tried to avoid his fate. The shortened version is that the king had a pretty daughter so he went to the Oracle at Delphi to ask who she should marry. The Oracle’s news was far from happy in his opinion. She told him his daughter’s marriage would cause his death. But the king did not want to roll over and lose his life so he made a contest that no one could beat, for a little while. Pelops won by cheating. He paid servants to replace the axle of the king’s chariot with a wax replica. When the race started no matter how fast the kings horses were, they couldn’t stop the accident that killed the him. The moral of the story? Cheating makes you win! No. The real moral is something like “don’t try to avoid fate.”
Olympia’s games were one of the four games that were held in rotation in different parts of Greece. Over fifty thousand spectators and athletes poured into the stadium. Athletes would coat themselves in olive oil followed by dirt, a form of ancient sunscreen! The games were much like today’s Olympic Games with fewer events. They had discus throwing and many running events. There were also javelin, wrestling and strength competitions as well. As stated earlier, anyone could watch as long as they had an offering and they were Greek. To be contrary to my earlier statement though, not strictly everyone could watch. In fact, only one woman was aloud to be present. In her own little box sat a priestess of Demeter, generally an older village woman.
If an athlete won three times in any game or year, their city would pay for a statue to honor the city’s prowess in raising such a good athlete. If anyone got caught cheating, he would be forever shamed along with his family and city by way of a statue at the public entrance to the stadium.
The sacred lighting of the flame ceremony turned out to not be as sacred as we imagined. Around 1936, for the Berlin Olympics, Carl Diem the secretary of the Organizing Committee of the XI Olympiad decided the Olympics needed something special. He discussed his ideas with Greece and they hired actresses and filmed the ceremony in Olympia. Ever since, the first torch is lit in Olympia with a parabolic mirror forming a flame from the sun and subsequently passed from one torch to another until it arrives at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. People are hired every four years to perform this “sacred” tradition in front of the temple to Hera in ancient Olympia. Look for it broadcast on April 16, 2024 for the upcoming Paris Games.
Olympia could be a nice day trip or overnight stay with some surprising history at the museum. The temples were pretty and we enjoyed imagining they were still standing. We’ve seen a lot of ruins and they’ve all started to blur together but this one stood out, I’m happy to share it with you.
