While the Rio Olympics 2016 just around the corner, I was fortunate to get a great insight by visiting the birth place of Olympics during my cruise on board the beautiful Oceania Cruises Riviera. Yes the birth place of Olympics is the town from where it gets its name Ancient Olympia.
Sailing in to the Katakolon
However the access to this historic site is via a quaint Greek fishing village Katakolon which has a population of just 600 permanent residents. This port is also one of my favorite ports to get a great sea food lunch.
Port of Katakolon
Your drive to Olympia is a 45 min scenic drive through the country side. Once you arrive at the site parking I recommend to freshen up before you proceed ahead.
Before I give you a complete history tour, let me give you some juicy bits to keep your interest
- Did you know that the Ancient Olympics was primarily a male Event? Well what is more intriguing is that all the games were performed by Men Nude,,, yes Nude. And Women were not allowed in the stadium during the events with a law of beheading if they did dare to enter. Ouch.
Ruins in Ancient Olympia
Guided tour at Olympia
place where the statue of Nike was placed
Well now back to the history:
Olympic Games: Starting in 776 BC, the Olympic Games were the most renowned of the four extraordinary national celebrations of the ancient Greeks. The other three celebrations were the Isthmian Games, the Pythian Games and the Nemean Games. Old Greeks held the Olympic Games at regular intervals to celebrate and respect Zeus, the defender and leader of mortals and the Olympian group of divine beings. The games went on for five days. Invitations were sent all through the Greek world to welcome the city states to participate in paying tribute to Zeus. The city-states dispatched gatherings of local champions to compete with each other with their skills and graceful equipment’s. The competition was only open to honorable Greek men.
So now that you know a brief on the Ancient Olympics lets see a brief on events.
The order of the events is not precisely known, but the first day of the festival was devoted to sacrifices. The second day began, with footraces, for which the spectators gathered in the Stadium. On other days wrestling, boxing, and the pancratium, a combination of the two, were held. In the first of these sports, the object was to throw the oponent to the ground three times. Boxing became more and more brutal. At first the fighters wound straps of soft leather over their fingers as a means of deadening the blows, but in later times hard leather, sometimes weighted with metal was used. This would be far brutal compared to the modern day WWF (if you believe the camera tricks)
In the pancratium, the most rigorous of the sports, the contest continued until one of the participants acknowledged defeat. Horse racing, in which each entrant owned his horse, was confined to the wealthy but was nevertheless a popular attraction. After the horseracing came the pentathlon, a series of five events: wrestling, discus throwing, javelin hurling, long jumpingand sprinting. The exact sequence of the events and the method used to determine the winner are not known. In 393 AD the Roman emperor Theodosius I suppressed the ancient Olympic
Games for reasons known to him.
However The modern Olympic Games began in Athens, Greece, in 1896 and the latest Olympics is scheduled in Rio, 2016 Aug 5th – 21st.
