OLYMPOS

Olympos…..the mountain
Olympics….the games
Olympia……place where the games were held
Olympiad….the four year interval games The earliest Mount Olympos lies 15 miles inland in N.W. Greece ….
However there is more than one Olympos….. Turkey also is host to two mountains of the same name…….! 1. Mount Olympos in N.W. Turkey in the province of Bursa
standing at 2543 metres, now known as Uludag…a very fashionable ski resort.

2. Mount Olympos in S.W. Turkey in the province of Antalya standing at 2345 metres, now known as Tahtali dag.picture

Why the necessity to increase these geological features?

Greeks colonised areas beyond mainland Greece as early as the Bronze Age settling along the western coast of Asia-Minor and they brought their deities with them placing them atop local mountain peaks.

As the legend goes the twelve Olympian deities seized Mount Olympos from earlier generations of their mythological relatives: Kronos, Rhea etc and the primordial Gaia (Zeus’s grandmother). GAIA during the battle of Titanomachy took his side allowing her sons the Hundred-Handers to help him.

Zeus then cast his thunderbolt at the Titans and threw them all into Tartarus. The twelve members of Olympian family now control the Cosmos settling in comfortable disharmony among the 52 peaks of the mountain. Here the fabled fire of Hestia Goddess of the hearth was kept alight day and night...
As the story goes Heracles initiated the Olympic Games. To atone for killing his wife and children he had been sent to serve the king of Mycene Eurystheus, who set him the famous 12 labours. With the help of Apollo Heracles completed these and to celebrate his prowess he decided to hold Games below a hill dedicated to Kronos …….Kronos being his grandfather!
( for Olympian family-trees please read Robert Graves,Stephen Fry or Natalie Haynes to understand their DNA, discrepancies and differences).
The very first game was a sprint.
For this Heracles marked a line below Mount Kronos scratching the distance of one stade in the sand (approx 180 metre) with a stick…from where we may obtain idioms such as …’from scratch’ or ‘drawing a line in the sand’? …(just my take on it)
This one stade was to be run in a single breath, which Heracles could manage…..but could other contestants? In known time the games started in 776 B.C.E. when athletic competitions were held every ‘Olympiad’ or four years at the third full moon after the summer solstice. Measurements for stadium and hippodrome then became uniform. Among the races held were`: running, wrestling, chariot racing, long jump, javelin and discs throwing.
However much the city states of Greece vied for supremacy….. they all recognised the communal sanctuary of their holy mountain where the Games were celebrated.
The Games continued when Zeus under Rome became Jupiter ( 146 B.C.E. )
The inter-family squabbles of Olympic deities must have become quite tiring for their Roman followers who decided to introduce more abstract deities to the pantheon such as ‘Fortuna’ and Dea Roma. With the acceptance of Christianity as state religion the games lost their importance and were eventually banned by Emperor Theodosius 2nd (408-450 C.E.) who had a chapel dedicated to Saint Elias (Elijah) constructed near the Olympic peak….

…..though many continued to pay homage to Zeus. Providently….. in the middle of the 5th century C.E. earthquakes and flooding covered the mountain in debris.The site literally disappeared for almost 1500 years…….. to be rediscovered in the 18th century by an Englishman Richard Chandler. He found the site buried beneath 4 metres of silt near a river, beneath the Kronos peak. In 1896 Greece decided to reinstitute the Games every ‘Olympiad’.
Ever since then apart from during the two W.W. years every four years a country hosts the Games when the flame of Hestia is carried to the Games new destination…. this year Tom Cruise abseiled the flame from Paris to return it to Olympus in preparation for the next Olympic venue.

Even today we revere the heritage of the ancient gods. A 3000 metre snow covered peak was named Mount Kronos in 1956 by the Australian Antarctic Research team.