Delphi, Olympia and the questions the Greeks asked their gods

The ancient Greeks did not have a single church or a single court. What they had instead was a scatter of sanctuaries, each with its own specialism, and a habit of travelling considerable distances to consult them. If you wanted to know whether to found a colony or go to war, you went to Delphi. If you wanted your city to be remembered, you sent athletes to Olympia. The buildings are mostly rubble now, but the logic of where they were put has not really gone anywhere.

The oracle on the mountain

Delphi sits on the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus, in a fold of the mountain dramatic enough that the ancient Greeks called it the navel of the world and, for once, the description undersells the place rather than overselling it. The sanctuary was dedicated to Apollo, and its Pythia, a priestess who delivered pronouncements from a tripod, was consulted by kings, generals and ordinary citizens for the best part of a thousand years. Her answers were famously ambiguous. Historians still debate whether that was policy or simply the nature of the job: an oracle who is never wrong needs to be careful about ever being precise.

The Sacred Way climbs past the treasuries that city-states built to store their offerings, competing with each other in marble the way they might otherwise have competed in war, and arrives at a theatre with one of the great views in Greek archaeology: the temple terrace below, the valley of olive trees beyond it, and the Gulf of Corinth a long way off. It is a site designed to make you feel that a serious question deserved a serious walk to ask it.

Olympia, and the truce that made the Games possible

Olympia is flatter and greener, set in a river valley in the western Peloponnese rather than clinging to a mountainside, and it served a different god and a different purpose. This was the sanctuary of Zeus, and every four years from 776 BC by the ancient Greeks' own reckoning, it hosted the Olympic Games. What made the Games possible was not the running track, which survives, or the enormous gold and ivory statue of Zeus that once stood in the temple and counted among the ancient world's Seven Wonders, which does not. It was the Olympic Truce, a suspension of hostilities between city-states that were, for most of the rest of the calendar, cheerfully at war with each other, so that athletes and spectators could travel safely.

The scale of the ambition is still legible in the ruins: a stadium for foot races, a gymnasium and palaestra for training, temples, treasuries and, eventually, a hotel for dignitaries. Olympia was less a stadium than a small city that existed to host one event, four days every four years, and then went quiet again.

Mycenae, Epidaurus and the Peloponnese in between

The Peloponnese, the peninsula connected to the rest of Greece by the narrow Isthmus of Corinth, holds enough of this kind of site that a single trip can move between eras rather than staying in one. Mycenae predates Delphi and Olympia by centuries: a Bronze Age citadel whose Lion Gate and beehive-shaped tholos tombs gave nineteenth-century excavators, notably Heinrich Schliemann, the evidence that the legends of Agamemnon and the Trojan War had grown out of a real and formidable civilisation, even if the details had grown in the telling. Epidaurus, not far away, was a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, and its theatre is the best preserved in Greece, built into a hillside with an accuracy of acoustics that architects still study.

Nafplio, on the coast below, has a more recent claim on Greek history: it was the first capital of the modern Greek state after independence in the 1820s, a small, handsome town of Venetian fortifications and neoclassical streets that makes an easy base for a day among the ruins inland.

Two ways to see it

A week built around Athens, Olympia and the Corinth coast covers the classical highlights at a reasonable pace, with the capital's museums as bookends. A longer route through the Peloponnese adds Mycenae, Epidaurus, Mani and Monemvasia to the itinerary, along with a swing through Delphi on the way back, and asks for the best part of a fortnight rather than a week. Either way, the Corinth Canal is usually somewhere on the route: a narrow, sheer-sided cut through the isthmus, opened in 1893 after an idea that had occurred to Roman emperors and been abandoned each time. It is a modern monument on a route otherwise dedicated to ancient ones, and it is worth the stop for the vertigo alone.

What all these sites share is a refusal to explain themselves fully. You can read the history beforehand and still stand at Delphi, or in the roofless throne room at Mycenae, and feel that something is being withheld. That, in the end, may be the most honest souvenir the ancient Greeks left behind: a permanent, well-built reminder that they thought some questions were worth putting to something larger than themselves, and that they were prepared to build accordingly.