During our trip to Greece, one must-visit spot for us was Ancient Olympia on the Peloponnese peninsula. Especially exciting was visiting right as Olympic fever was ramping up for the Summer Olympics in Japan. We definitely felt the Olympic fever (and no, it wasn’t COVID 😉 )
Ancient Olympia
We visited three spots within Ancient Olympia: the Ancient Olympic Games Museum, the Archaeological Museum and the open air site of Olympia itself.
Our first stop was the Ancient Olympic Games museum
One cool thing we learned is that, during the 2004 Athens Olympics, for one day, 2,780 years after the first Olympic games were held there, the Olympic shot put event was held at the stadium in Olympia.
After the Ancient Olympic Games museum, we headed to the other museum on site, the Olympia Archaeological Museum. As expected, that museum has a much stronger artifact game.
This museum focused a bit more on Zeus, whose temple on this site was said to be of proportions previously unseen before it was built in the 5th century BC. In fact, the 12m high status of Zeus in his temple (no longer there) was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.
The most impressive part of this museum was the central hall with decoration from the Temple of Zeus.
We also went by the remains of the Temple of Zeus, a mighty temple built to honor Zeus in the 5th century BC, but eventually destroyed by earthquakes in the 6th century AD.
The Palaestra was a place full of standing columns, apparently where wrestling was taught in the ancient times.
But, of all the things we saw and did in Ancient Olympia, the coolest was racing in the stadium where thousands of athletes had raced before us.
Once again, benefitting from low numbers of travelers during COVID, there were only a few other groups there at the same time as us, and every group took turns for their moment, running in the same place athletes raced for glory in millennia past.
We had a great time visiting Ancient Olympia, and it was definitely a highlight of our time in Greece.
