Temple of Zeus

Listen first. Cicadas buzz in the pine trees, and somewhere beyond them a river runs over stones. Under your feet the ground is soft and sandy, and the air smells of resin and warm dust. In front of you lies a long stone platform. Around it, huge round drums of stone lie on their sides in neat rows, like coins spilled from a giant's purse. This is what remains of the Temple of Zeus, once the heart of the most sacred sanctuary in ancient Greece.

Olympia was never a city in the usual sense. It was a sanctuary, a holy ground dedicated above all to Zeus, king of the Greek gods. For over a thousand years, athletes, pilgrims and envoys came here every four years for the Olympic Games. The games were a religious festival as much as a sporting one. Victory was an offering to the god. And this temple, built in the fifth century before Christ, was the house where that god was believed to live.

The temple was built in the decades after the Greeks defeated the Persian invasions, a time of confidence and wealth. Ancient sources name its architect as Libon, a man from Elis, the nearby city that ran the sanctuary. He chose the Doric style. Doric is the plainest and heaviest of the classical Greek orders. It has thick columns, no base under them, and simple cushion-like tops. When it was finished, this was one of the largest temples in mainland Greece.

Now look closely at one of the fallen drums. The stone is rough and full of tiny holes and fragments of shell. This is a local shelly limestone, cut from quarries in the region. Here is the first surprise. In antiquity, nobody saw this coarse texture. The builders covered the stone in a thin coat of fine white stucco, so the temple looked smooth and bright, almost like marble. What you see today is the bare skeleton beneath the skin.

The columns did not fall in a battle. They fell in earthquakes, most likely in the sixth century after Christ. Look at the way the drums lie. Whole columns toppled in the same direction, and their sections still sit in order, one after another, on the ground. Later, the nearby river Kladeos flooded again and again. Thick layers of silt and sand buried the sanctuary. For centuries, Olympia lay hidden under the earth, and its exact location faded from common knowledge.

The rediscovery came in the nineteenth century. Travellers identified the site, and from the 1870s German archaeologists carried out large, systematic excavations here. They lifted the silt away and found the temple floor, the fallen columns, and many of the sculptures that once decorated the building. Those sculptures are not here in the open air today. They stand in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, a short walk away. Seeing them after the ruins is like putting the colour back into a black and white photograph.

The sculptures told stories. The east front, the main entrance, showed the moment before a famous chariot race. In the myth, a hero named Pelops raced against a king called Oinomaos to win the king's daughter in marriage. Pelops won, and the region of the Peloponnese carries his name. The west front showed a wild battle between centaurs, half men and half horses, and a people called the Lapiths, with the god Apollo standing calm in the middle of the chaos.

Above the inner porches were twelve square panels called metopes. Together they showed the twelve labours of Heracles, the hero known to the Romans as Hercules. He fights the lion, cleans the stables, holds up the sky. Legend says Heracles himself founded the Olympic Games, so his story belonged here. There is a small human detail in one panel. The goddess Athena helps Heracles carry the weight of the heavens, quietly lending a hand to a tired hero.

But the real treasure stood inside. Around the middle of the fifth century before Christ, the sculptor Pheidias made a giant seated statue of Zeus for this temple. Pheidias was the most celebrated sculptor of his age. The statue had a wooden core covered with ivory for the skin and gold for the robes. This technique is called chryselephantine, meaning gold and ivory. The statue became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the only one of them in mainland Greece.

Ancient writers tried to describe its scale. The geographer Strabo wrote that if Zeus stood up from his throne, he would lift the roof off the temple. That gives you a sense of how the statue filled the inner room. The traveller Pausanias, who visited in the second century after Christ, also tells us that a shallow pool of olive oil lay in front of the statue. The oil helped protect the ivory from the damp air rising from the river ground.

Here is the second surprise. Just west of the temple, archaeologists found the workshop where Pheidias built the statue. It was a building with almost the same inner size as the temple's main room. Inside they found tools, clay moulds for the gold drapery, and a small black cup. Scratched on its base are Greek words meaning "I belong to Pheidias". It is a rare, personal object from one of the greatest artists of the ancient world, now on display in the site museum.

The statue itself is lost. Ancient accounts say it was taken to Constantinople, today's Istanbul, and later destroyed, probably in a fire. As you walk around, look for the one standing column on the south side. It was set up again from its own original drums for the Athens Olympic Games in 2004. It gives you a sense of the height of the colonnade. And one more detail many visitors miss: the Olympic flame today is lit at the Temple of Hera nearby, not here.

Before you move on, stand at the eastern end, where the ramp once led up to the entrance. Pilgrims arrived here after long journeys, dusty and tired, to face their god. Today the temple is open to the sky, and pine branches move where a roof once stood. Run your eye along the fallen drums, then up to the green hill of Kronos behind the sanctuary. The cicadas are still singing. The river still runs. Take a moment, and then walk on slowly toward the stadium.