Toward the end of our whirlwind trip through Greece we rented a car and drove clear across the country to Olympia! After having places like Mycenae and Polyrinnia pretty much to ourselves we braced ourselves for an onslaught of people... who wouldn't be going to see where the Olympics started? Well, we were right; it was packed in comparison to the other places and you could visibly tell when new tour buses arrived when groups of people would whoosh into the center of the museum. We made a quick run through, including the amazing pediments and metopes from the Temple of Zeus, before heading over to the site proper.
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| Palestra |
What a difference! The site of the original Olympic games is large enough to get away from groups. We wandered from the gymnasium to the
Palestra past the sixteen bases of
Zanes, aka. statues of Zeus. On one edge of the site, we spied the corner of a beautiful mosaic, the rest covered over with plastic then dirt to weight it down. We might have peeked below the plastic a bit, but we put it back! In the early games, athletes came to Olympia months in advance to train, staying in the
Leonidaion. You can still make out rooms and suites surrounding the central courtyard.
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| Leonidaion |
When we reached the stadium you could actually see the original start and finish lines of the short distance foot race, raised in stone, still intact. According to the guidebook, Olympia was covered over by silt and mud and only unburied in 1766. Just as we remember names like Usain Bolt and Carl Lewis, the short distance foot race, or the
stade, guaranteed the winner international recognition. Each Olympiad was named after the winner of the
stade and he got free meals for life in his hometown. But what the guidebook SHOULD have said was "Wear sneakers because you TOO can run the
stade!!!" I was dressed in a skirt and we both had sandals so this was a lost opportunity for us but while we were taking a break up on the hill a couple came and the guy, equipped with tennis shoes, ran the race! We hadn't heard American accents for days until then and I was so proud to cheer for an American at Olympia!
Gardner's pages 120-22 (Temple of Zeus, Olympia)
