I have to say. I love love love Olympia. The town is centered around the ancient Olympic Stadium and the Temple of Zeus and Hera. In ancient times, it was forbidden for anyone to live at the site or in the surrounding area except for priests, with the exception of the 8 day festival of the Olympic games, held once every four years, when thousands of people would come to witness the athletic competitions. All warfare among Greek city-states temporarily ceased at that time, under the premise that athletic ability could be used to show superiority of the different city-states instead of death.
The ground was literally littered with massive drums for the columns from the temple of Zeus. It's difficult to show exactly how large these drums actually were, but they were easily five feet wide, and you could climb all over them. This temple of the most grandiose of all the temples made to honor one single god and people from all over Greece would travel to pay homage before competing.
These arches were the entrance into the Olympic stadium. So imagine entering this tunnel about 90 feet long. As you're walking through you're taking off all your clothes and immerge into the stadium, naked, to a crowd of thousands of screaming spectators, the ruling class of all of Greece, and the only woman allowed to watch the games, a priestess considered to be the goddess of Hera in human form.
Some of the class decided to race. The guy in the khakis and the guy behind him is Andrew and Bob, respectively, our faculty.
Olympia, Greece has Evergreens too.
This picture gives you an idea of how pediments looked. Pediments were placed on tops the different sides of temples. In the highest nd most central point of the pediments, usually a god was placed, dictating some action to be done amidst scenes common to Greek myth. From there, both the physical and symbolic positions and significance of various figures would gradually decline until you had humans kneeling or crouching at the ends of the pediments, typically reacting to the situation being presented rather than partaking in the action.
These women are the farthest left on the pediment pictured above, crouching in fear of the Centaurs.
These statues come from one of the pediments of the Temple of Zeus, depicting the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths. The imagery of Centaurs isn't considered a literal artistic representation, but rather a metaphor of the barbarous nature of foreign peoples, using half-animal, half-human motifs to express superiority of Greeks over their more animalistic natures of their neighbors. The story goes that the Greeks invited Centaurs to celebrate the wedding feasts of Pelops to the princess of the Lapiths. The Centaurs proceeded to get sh*t-faced and began raping the women and fighting the men. Apollo (not pictured but just the right of these statues) is ordering Pelops to kill this Centaur, who is fondling the princess, Pelop's bride.
This is the status of Apollo and Dionysus. The legend goes that Zeus ordered Apollo to hide the half-man, half-goat bastard demigod from his wife, Hera, so Apollo wrapped him in a blanket to hide his goat features and stole him away to the countryside to be raised by nymphs in the mountains. The assumption is that Apollo is taunting Dionysus with a bunch of grapes because, naturally, Dionysus grows up to become the deity of wine and drunken tomfoolery.
::giggle::
Statue of Nike, goddess of victory. Yes, the shoe company was named after her. In her original form, she would have been double her height here, about twelve feet tall counting her wings, and topped on one of the temples here.
Well, I've got the big test in an hour and a half and then flying off to Florence tomorrow. May update later if I have a chance. Hopefully our apartments will have wifi. And I will have a kitchen. Hurray!
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