Olympia/Pylos

So the final school sponsored trip that i went on was to Olympia, Pylos (just my class) and Delphi. I'm going to cover Olympia/Pylos first, then Delphi seperately. There's just so much to cover!

So the bus ride to Olympia took about 5 hours. Not the worst ever, when compared with the trip to Thessaloniki. Which whoops, i forgot to talk about!!! Yikes. Next thing to get done! So we arrived and the weather looked downright grim, all weekend. But thankfully it didn't rain for much of the time. We checked into the hotel, which was verrrrry nice, but the staff was soooo mean/inpolite, it wasn't even funny. They always gave us this cold stare of...not hatred, but annoyance. But we weren't even doing anything wrong! Whatever.

So we went to the Olympia site that afternoon and quickly went through the site. There's mostly ruins here, but it's a rather large site with a lot of buildings. Many of them are gyms, where the atheletes would train to compete in the games. To compete, a person had to be the son of free parents, meaning that he was free, be a Greek (though this would change), and come to Olympia one month before the games began to train/learn how to properly take part in the games. Once their training was complete and the games began, people from ALL over Greece (and i mean ALL over) came to Olympia. Crowds of 100,000 people were not out of the realm of possibility. There were no hotels, so people lived in tents on marshy fields for about a week while the games took place.

All these buildings were built outside of the Sanctuary wall. What's important to know is that the Olympic games were considered to be a sacred tradition. There was a peace imposed two weeks before and after the games to allow travellers safe passage to and from the games. This peace (over the course of close to 1,000 years) was only broken a few times, so highly did the Greeks view the Olympics. The gyms were not the only type of buildings at Olympia. There were also a number of temples dedicated to the various deities. The most famous was that of the Temple of Zeus.

This temple was a massive Dorian (simple column type) temple constructed around 470-450 BCE was a predecessor to the Parthenon. The same guy, Praxidalis (don't worry, you don't have to remember his name, i'm just enlightening you with facts you can pull out at dinner conversations :-)) later went on to build the Parthenon itself. The temple was massive, the column drums easily were as tall as I was (so 6-7 feet wide and tall), so you get an idea of how big they were. The friezes above depicted famous scenes from Greek mythology which i won't bore you with. The highlight of the temple was the famous statue of Zeus. It was one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient World. The statue itself was over 20 meters (65 feet) tall SITTING DOWN, and supposedly if it stood up, it would break a hole through the roof! It was covered with ivory and gold, but was not solid. Instead, it had a wooden structure around which the ivory and gold were inlaid. Below was a pool of olive oil which reflected light up up onto the statue, making it a truly impressive sight.

Sadly nothing remains of this statue, and the temple itself was destroyed in the 5th Century CE (AD) by the dirty-good-for-nothing Theodosius II, a Christian emperor of Rome (rather Constantinople at the time) who ordered all Pagan practices to end and all Pagan temples/relics to be destroyed. Hence, all the columns of the temple were pushed/pulled down and much of what was there was destroyed. Thankfully not everything was destroyed, but he sure caused a lot of headaches for modern historians.

The final building we went to see was the Stadium. This was where most of the action during the Olympic Games took place. The most famous races consisted of foot and chariot races, though there was also discus, javelin, wrestling, and my personal favorite, the pankration. Here, the only rules were, 1) no poking of the eyes, and 2) no biting. Other than that, anything went, from breaking arms to choking, whatever you needed to do to get your opponent to submit. There were no built seats at Olympia, rather you sat on the slope. The highlight of the games was the stade, which was a sprinting race similar to the 100 meter dash in today's games. This race varied in length, as the runner ran the length of the stadium once. Some were longer, some were shorter, Olympia's was 200 meters. After running that, let me tell you from personal experience...not fun. You get about 100 meters in and realize you're only halfway there.

Once you won your event, you recieved a laurel crown and made sacrifices to Zeus in the temple. When you returned to your city-state, that was when the real celebration began. A section of the citiy's wall was ripped down for the victor to endter through and he recieved free meals...for life. That, and a lot of attention. Not bad.

On the next day, we went to Pylos. Pylos is best remembered for it's Mycenaean (remember them?) palace that appears to have been a immensely important palace. it controlled a large area and had many of it's remains preserved due to the fire which destroyed the complex. I won't bore you with another long summary of the Mycenaeans, but what's notable was that some of the original painting/carvings were still visible, an impressive fact considering it's about 3,000 years old.

We then went down in Pylos town to have lunch. There was a cool Venetian castle on top of the hill which provided an excellent view of the town. It also provided a nice view of Sphacteria, the island off the coast which creates a nice sheltered port. Without going much into detail, Sphacteria was the location of major engagements in two sepearate time periods. During the Peloponnesian War, some Spartan hoplites got trapped on the island by the Athenians. They managed to hold out for a while on the island on very meager rations while the Sparatans back home sued for peace. It's a long section in Thucydides, our source on the war, but i won't go more into detail. Essentially, the Spartans surrendered in the end. The other major engagement was during the Greek war of Independence. Here, the British, French, and Russian navies met the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets in the last major battle of the Age of Sail. The Ottomans and Egyptians were SOUNDLY defeated by the others, leaving the door open for Greek independence to begin. Kinda crazy.

On our last day in Olympia, we went to the museum, which had a lot of bronzes and sculptures and such, which again i won't bore you with. I couldn't do half of it justice, but essentially it houses the remains of the pedimental sculpture of the Temple of Zeus. The other major work was the sculpture by Praxidaleis of Hermes and Dionysus, which is supposed to be the most perfect representation of the human form (sorry David, not quite realistic there ;-)). I had my problems with it, but it was overlal pretty impressive.

We then went on to Delphi, after passing over a cool bridge between the Pelopenesse and Central Greece which is designed to withstand a tsunami, yup, a tsunami, and to expand as the tectonic plates seperate in the region.

On to Delphi, after i post about Thessaloniki (d'oh!)