Travel, pilgrimage, and the Greek Olympics

The Athens Olympics are due to start any day now, and — amidst all the hype — I wanted to remind everyone how the ancient Greek Olympics once represented the most profound travel event in the Western world. As my travel-writing colleague Tony Perrottet says in his recent book The Naked Olympics, “each Olympiad was an extension of Hellenic unity, an all-consuming pageant, the meeting place of heaven and earth, as spiritually profound for pagans as a pilgrimage to Varanasi for Hindus or the Muslim hajj.”

I’ll be quoting from Tony’s book off and on for the next couple of weeks. I’ll start off today with a long passage that captures the spirit and scene of those ancient Greek games:

“To recapture the allure of the ancient Olympics, we have to realize that sports were only on part of the festival. The Games were actually the ultimate pagan entertainment package, where every human diversion could be found at once, on and off the field…The site had grand procession routes, dozens of altars, public banquet halls, booths for sideshow artists. In terms of audience satisfaction, our own revived Olympic Games can hardly compare

Posted by | Comments (1)  | August 10, 2004
Category: Travel Writing


One Response to “Travel, pilgrimage, and the Greek Olympics”

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