Olympia

Olympia was a sanctuary of Zeus in the valley of the Alfeiós in the western Peloponnese — not a city, and nowhere near Mount Olympus in the north. Its walled precinct was the Altis, from an Elean word for the wooded grove. Occupation from about 1500 BC was long assumed; others date worship from the burnt offerings of the tenth century BC, and no buildings survive from that period.

The first festival was organised by Elis in the eighth century BC, tradition fixing the first games at 776 BC and a truce holding across Greece while they ran — one that guaranteed safe passage to visitors and no more, and did not stop all wars in Greece, or even at Olympia. Elis' power waned and the sanctuary fell to the Pisatans in 676 BC, until Elis, with Sparta, occupied Pisa in 580 BC and took it back. The Skiloudians built the Temple of Hera around 600 BC, and the first stadium, a plain track of about 560 BC, was remodelled around 500 BC with sloping sides for spectators.

The Temple of Zeus, built between 470 and 456 BC, was beyond anything raised on the site before it. Inside stood the cult image: a chryselephantine Zeus of gold and ivory over a wooden frame, twelve metres high, made by Pheidias and counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world. The workshop nearby was excavated in the 1950s, and the tools found there, with a cup inscribed "I belong to Pheidias", bore out the identification.

Late in the fourth century Philip II dedicated the round Philippeion to Zeus, Alexander finishing it, and about 300 BC the Leonidaion, the largest building on the site, went up to lodge important visitors. The track ran 192.27 m, the length that fixed the stadion as a unit of distance; no seating tiers were built, and spectators sat on the slopes.

Under Rome the games were opened to all citizens of the empire and the buildings repaired, the Temple of Zeus among them, with the Nymphaeum of Herodes Atticus added in 150 AD. The third century brought a series of earthquakes, and in 267 AD, with tribes invading, the site's centre was fortified with stone robbed from its own monuments.

The festival ran on to a last Olympiad placed at 393 AD by some accounts and 392 by others, before the Christian emperor Theodosius I banned it, and the Temple of Zeus was destroyed around 426 AD in the persecution of pagans that followed an edict of Theodosius II. Pheidias' workshop was made over into a basilica, and the archaeology suggests small Olympic events were still held in secret until Justinian's plague and two earthquakes wrecked the place in the mid-sixth century. The settlement was abandoned in the seventh century — to flooding by some accounts, to raids by others — and Slav burials of the seventh and eighth centuries followed before the valley emptied in the ninth.

Alluvium up to eight metres deep buried the ruins — river flooding by the long-standing explanation, tsunamis by a newer one drawn from the shells and foraminifera in it. The antiquarian Richard Chandler re-discovered the exact site in 1766, and the first excavation came on 10 May 1829, with the French archaeologists of the Expédition scientifique de Morée. Digging for six weeks under Léon-Jean-Joseph Dubois and Abel Blouet, they fixed the location and identity of the Temple of Zeus for the first time, and took metope fragments to France with the permission of Kapodistrias' government.

The first major excavation opened in 1875, funded by the German government after Ernst Curtius negotiated exclusive access, and worked the sanctuary's centre. The Nike of Paionios and the Hermes of Praxiteles came out of it, and 14,000 objects were recorded and shown in a site museum. Excavation and preservation have been the responsibility of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens since the 1870s, including a campaign from 1936 under Emil Kunze for the Berlin Olympics and Helmut Kyrieleis' work on the Prytaneion and Pelopion from 1984 to 1996.

The flame of the modern games is kindled at the Temple of Hera from sunlight caught in a parabolic mirror and carried by torch to the host city; when Athens held the 2004 Olympics the shot put was staged in the ancient stadium, as the least disruptive event. The 106-hectare site has been a World Heritage Site since 1989, in the care of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Ilia. In March 2021 a bronze bull figurine some twenty-five centuries old was found near the Temple of Zeus, a horn noticed sticking out of the ground after heavy rain.