Olympia: the sanctuary of Zeus

Olympia lies in the west of the Peloponnese, the large peninsula in the south of Greece. It sits in a green valley where two rivers meet, the Alpheios and the Kladeos, below a small hill called the Kronion. Most ancient Greek sites are dry and rocky, but Olympia is full of trees. People lived in this valley long before there were any temples, from about 4000 BC. From about the 10th century BC, it became a place where people worshipped Zeus, the king of the gods.

The heart of Olympia was the Altis, the sacred precinct of Zeus. Its name comes from the local form of the word ἄλσος, a grove: a small wood. A place like this is called a sanctuary, a holy place that belongs to a god. Inside the Altis stood temples, statues and small buildings full of precious gifts. Near the centre was the great βωμός, the altar of Zeus, where people offered sacrifices to the god. Every four years, Greeks from many cities came here for the festival of Zeus and the Olympic Games.

In the south of the Altis stood the ναός, the temple of Zeus. It was designed by an architect from the nearby city of Elis called Libon. Building began around 470 BC, and the temple was finished by about 456 BC. It was the largest temple in the whole Peloponnese. It was built in the Doric style, with 6 columns at each end and 13 along each side. Each column was more than 10 metres tall. The builders used a local stone full of tiny shells. They covered it with a white plaster made with marble dust, so that it looked like marble.

High up at each end, in the triangle under the roof called the pediment, stood large marble statues. The east pediment showed a chariot race from a myth, between the hero Pelops and King Oinomaos, with Zeus standing in the middle. The west pediment showed a wild fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, creatures that were half man and half horse, with the god Apollo in the centre. Smaller carved panels, the metopes, showed the twelve labours of the hero Heracles.

Inside the temple sat Olympia’s most famous ἄγαλμα, or statue. The sculptor Pheidias of Athens made it around 430 BC. It was about 12 metres high, as tall as a four-storey house. Zeus sat on a throne. In his right hand he held a small figure of Nike, the goddess of νίκη, victory. In his left hand he held a sceptre with an eagle on top, and on his head he wore a wreath of olive. The statue was χρυσελεφάντινος, made of gold and ivory: a wooden frame was covered with thin plates of ivory for the skin and of gold for the clothes and hair. People counted it among the Seven Wonders of the World.

Pheidias worked in an ἐργαστήριον, a workshop, just west of the temple. It was built the same size as the room inside the temple, so he could see how the statue would look. Archaeologists found clay moulds and tools in and around the workshop, and even a small cup with Pheidias’ name on it. Later, Christians built a church on top of the workshop, and its walls still stand.

The statue itself is lost. It was taken to Constantinople, and many historians think it burned there in a fire around AD 475. We know what it looked like from old coins and from Pausanias, a traveller who described it in the 2nd century AD.

Olympia had many other buildings:

• The temple of Hera, built around 600 BC, one of the oldest Greek temples of its kind. Its first columns were made of wood.
• A row of small treasuries under the Kronion hill, where Greek cities kept their gifts to the god.
• The round Philippeion, built by King Philip II of Macedon after his victory at Chaeronea in 338 BC.
• The palaestra and the gymnasium, where athletes trained, the stadium, and the Leonidaion, a large guesthouse for important visitors.

After ancient times, σεισμοί, earthquakes, threw down the columns of the temple of Zeus, and floods from the rivers covered the ruins with mud and sand. By the 7th century AD, people had left the place. In 1830 Greece gave France some metopes found by French scholars, and they are now in the Louvre in Paris. In 1875 German archaeologists began to dig the whole sanctuary, and they still work here with Greek archaeologists.

Today the museum shows the pediment statues and metopes of the temple, the flying Nike made by Paionios around 420 BC, and a statue of Hermes found in the temple of Hera, usually thought to be by Praxiteles. Olympia has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1989. In 2007 great forest fires burned the hills around it, but the ancient monuments were not harmed.