Temple of Hera, Olympia

Start with the ground. Under your feet is pale, packed earth, dry and dusty in summer and soft after rain. Around you the pine trees on the low hill move in the wind, and somewhere a cicada keeps up its steady buzz. In front of you stands a long rectangle of grey stone, broken columns, and stubby walls. It does not look like much at first. But this is one of the oldest monumental temples anywhere in Greece.

You are standing in the Altis, the sacred grove at the heart of ancient Olympia. The temple sits at its northern edge, close against the slope of the Hill of Kronos. The Greeks named that hill after the father of Zeus. Archaeologists generally date the temple to around 600 BCE, at the end of the seventh century or the start of the sixth. That makes it older than the great Temple of Zeus, which you can see further south across the grove.

The building was dedicated to Hera, the queen of the gods and the wife of Zeus. Many scholars think it may first have honoured both of them together. Later, Zeus received his own enormous temple, and this one became Hera's house alone. Its shape follows the classic Greek plan. There is a long inner hall, a porch at the front, and a porch at the back. A ring of columns surrounds it all, six across the ends and sixteen along each side.

Now look closely at the columns that still stand. Here is the first surprise. They do not match. Some are thick, some are slimmer. The capitals at the top, the flat cushions of stone, have different profiles. Some have more flutes, the vertical grooves, than others. A Greek temple was supposed to look uniform. So why does this one look like it was assembled from different sets?

The answer is wood. The earliest columns here were most likely made of timber. As each wooden column rotted or failed, the sanctuary replaced it with stone, in the style that was popular at that moment. Over several centuries the temple became a kind of catalogue of changing taste. The traveller Pausanias visited in the second century CE and wrote a guidebook to Greece. He reported that one column, in the back porch, was still made of oak.

The walls followed a similar logic. Look at the lower courses of the inner hall. They are built of cut stone, the local shelly limestone, full of tiny fossils if you look close. Above that stone base, the upper walls were once made of sun-dried mudbrick. The roof was wooden and covered in clay tiles. Mudbrick does not survive well, and that upper part has long since melted away. What you see now is only the solid stone footing.

So picture the temple as it was. It had painted terracotta decoration along the roof edge, bright reds and blacks against the sky. It had a dim interior that smelled of oil and smoke. Pausanias describes many treasures kept inside. He mentions statues, a carved chest of cedar wood, and a bronze disc said to carry the terms of the sacred Olympic truce. We know of them mainly through his words, so treat that inventory as a window, not a photograph.

The second surprise came from the soil itself. In 1877, German archaeologists excavating this temple found a marble statue of the god Hermes holding the infant Dionysus. It is often linked to the sculptor Praxiteles, though experts still debate whether it is his original work or a later piece. The statue now stands in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, just a short walk from here. It is worth seeing after you finish in the grove.

Hera's temple also connects to a story that many visitors never hear. The famous Olympic Games were for men. But Pausanias writes about another festival here, the Heraia, held in Hera's honour. In it, unmarried young women ran foot races in the stadium. He says they ran with their hair loose and wore a short tunic. Winners received an olive crown, and they could dedicate images of themselves to the goddess.

The temple's later history is quieter, and sadder. Like much of Olympia, it suffered from earthquakes and from the floods of the nearby rivers. Many scholars believe a powerful earthquake brought the building down in late antiquity, probably in the fourth century CE. Over the following centuries, silt and earth buried the whole sanctuary. Some of the columns you see standing were lifted back into place by modern archaeologists.

Now turn and look at the open space in front of the temple, toward the east. This is where the modern world returns to Olympia. The Olympic flame for every modern Games is lit here, in a ceremony that began with the torch relay for the 1936 Games. Performers dressed as ancient priestesses use a curved mirror to focus the sun's rays and ignite the flame. From this patch of ground, the fire travels across the world.

It is worth knowing that the ceremony is a modern invention. It is inspired by ancient practice, but it is not a direct survival of it. The Greeks did keep sacred fires burning at Olympia, and torch races were part of some festivals. Yet the relay and the mirror ritual were designed in the twentieth century. That does not make the moment less moving. It simply shows how people keep shaping old places into new meaning.

Before you move on, stand still for a moment. Run your eyes along the mismatched columns once more, one by one. Notice the fossils in the stone, the gaps where mudbrick once rose, and the green slope of Kronos behind. As you walk away, listen for the pines again. People have heard that same sound in this grove for well over two thousand years.