Studies of Travel - Greece

Olympia and its Church

Olympia, when the German diggers have fled before the heat of a Greek summer, when they have left all the statues and other beautiful things that they have found sealed up against all men, Greek and barbarian, may seem to be, even literally, Olympia with the spring taken out of its year. But Olympia can, for all general historical purposes, be Olympia without them; some minds may not greatly regret their absence. To some minds galleries, museums, collections of all kinds, are simply wearisome. The weariness is one which may be well endured for the sake of the knowledge which may be gained through it; still the contemplation of objects in rows and cases, catalogued and numbered, is weariness compared with the pure pleasure of contemplating the same objects, each in its right place, each forming part of the whole of which it was meant to form part. Better one statue without a nose, in the place where the sculptor first put it than ten statues with noses set up apart from their context in any collection in Athens, Rome, or London. No blame of course attaches to the diggers at Olympia. The objects which they found were not in their places, and could not be kept in their places. They can only be kept in a museum; and to our minds that museum should not only not be at Berlin or London — an evil of which Greek law forbids all danger — but it should be at Olympia and not at Athens. The little collection at Eleusis is in its right place; it is at Eleusis; so it should be with the greater collection at Olympia. But the feeling that a museum, with all that it teaches, is in itself a bore, that its lessons are painful lessons, somewhat tempers the traveller’s disappointment at finding that the relics are all shut up, and that the key is somewhere in Germany. For the buildings themselves are not carried away; they can be studied without let or hindrance, and perhaps with even a deeper feeling of thankfulness to those whose untiring zeal and energy have uncovered them. And the plain of Altis, the stream of Alpheios, the hill of Kronos, the mightier Arkadian mountains, are there in any case. And they, with the immortal remembrances of the spot, are the true Olympia.

From the port of Katakolon to the town of Pyrgos there is a road, and that road goes on further to Olympia itself. The venerable spot can therefore be reached in a carriage. The question might, however, be raised whether a carriage journey over such a road as that between Pyrgos and Olympia — a journey moreover modified by occasional spaces where it is better to go on foot — is not at least as tiring as the ride from Mykênê to Corinth. But, as the traveller goes along from Pyrgos to Olympia, especially as he nears the immediate object of his pilgrimage, he can hardly fail to draw the comparison between the nakedness of Attica and the land through which he passes, rich with trees and with cultivation, the bleak mountains replaced by lower hills which are often green with verdure, with villages scattered thick among them, the scenery in many places coming nearer to that of the hillier parts of England than might have seemed possible in Greece. It is only here and there, when the eye catches some of the more distant points of the landscape, especially when the vast heights of Arkadia come in view, that it is brought strongly home to his mind that it is through Hellas that he is journeying. At last, however, he reaches the spot which was the religious centre of Hellas, and there the Arkadian heights, soaring over the lower hills which surround the Olympian plain itself, fully remind him where he is. Here is the spot where, more than in any other, every Greek was reminded that, however war and policy might divide them, he was still a sharer with every other Greek in a heritage of language, religion, and general culture in which the barbarian had no share, where the Greek from the Spanish Zakynthos and the Greek from the Tauric Chersonêsos could feel themselves, if not countrymen, at least brethren, before the temple of the common Father of Gods and men. Here were the victories won which were recorded in the odes of Pindar; here, we would fain believe, Herodotus recited his history to assembled Greece; here the Macedonian King had to prove his descent from an Argeian stock before he could be admitted as a worthy competitor of Hellenic freemen; here Alkibiadês made that display of lavish splendour which at least proved that the resources of Athens were not worn out. And as we read inscription after inscription recording the name of Elis and her citizens, our thoughts go back to the never-forgotten claims of the true people of the land. We remember how Pisa — the name may almost seem strange in this, its more ancient seat — deemed herself to be the lawful President of the Olympian feast by an older right than could belong to the intruders from Aitolia. And we think too of that one day in later times when the arms of Thebes won back for them their ancient right for one passing moment. All this might press on the mind as we look on the plain by Alpheios, and people it in imagination with competitors, spectators, worshippers, the very realm and trysting-place of the scattered Hellenic nation. All this we might call up, even if no actual monument of those days were there to remind us of them. Yet it is something to think of all this beside the uncovered foundations of the great Pan-hellenic temple; and it is something more still to trace out all that Olympia suggests in the presence of remains which tell us of the times when the Pan-hellenic temple and its festival had passed away.

The foundations of four principal buildings have been brought to light by the German diggings. Two of them belong to the days alike of pagan worship and of Hellenic freedom. There is the lesser, the older temple, the temple of Hêrê, in the spreading capitals of its massive Doric columns — capitals, be it remembered, now lying shivered around their feet — carrying us back to the solemn and solid style of Poseidônia and of Corinth. Side by side with this venerable fragment we find inscriptions of Roman date, bearing witness to the unity of history, and showing how Olympia still remained holy after captive Greece had led captive her conquerors. Hard by stands the great central monument of all, the temple of Zeus itself, not a column of its vast ranges standing perfect, but with, frequently enough, capitals of less antique form than those of the lesser temple, to show the date and style and character of the building which held the greatest work of Pheidias. But it is not only the days of Pheidias, the days of free Greece, the days of Athenian, Spartan, and Theban rivalry, which are represented in their remains with that memorable precinct. Two periods of the history of Greece and the world have still to be represented. There is that vast semicircle of Roman brickwork, looking like the apse of a vast basilica, but which is in truth the exedra of Hêrôdês Atticus; for the bountiful man of Marathôn extended his bounty to the shrine of the common gods of Hellas as well as to the temples, the theatres, and all the public works of his own city. But the cycle is not yet complete; there is one age more to be represented, one phase more of the history of man to furnish its contribution to the architectural remains of Olympia. And that age, that phase, has, from one point of view at least, the highest claims on us of all. We take our chance of being set down as irreclaimable barbarians when we say that, after all, the building of highest interest of which the remains are now to be seen at Olympia is the admirable basilican church which occupies the site of the temple of Hippodameia. Enough remains to enable us to make out nearly the whole of its arrangements. It marks a very narrow view of things, a strange imprisonment of thought within a few arbitrarily chosen centuries when we see not a few who reverence every stone of the great and the little temple, even, it may be, every brick of the exedra of Hêrôdês, but who seem to turn up their noses at a monument at least as historical as any of them. No doubt the special interest of this particular building is largely due to the place where it is found. It is because it is found in the Altis of Olympia, because it is built on the site of one of the ancient temples of Olympia, because its materials have been supplied by that and by others of those temples, that the church which now stands as a ruin alongside of them has much of its special charm. To take the lowest view, it is a memorial of the greatest revolution of the whole course of history, the revolution which installed the worship of Christ and the Panagia on the site of the shrines of Zeus and Hêrê and Hippodameia. The classical purist cannot get rid either of the general history of mankind or of the more enlarged view of the history of art merely by shutting his eyes to both of them. The basilica is there; it is a fact; it is also a fact that those who placed it there had a special motive in placing it there — that of specially marking the triumph of the new faith by setting up its altars on the site of the fallen altars of heathendom. And it is a fact also that, however mere classical pedantry may despise the style in which that basilica was reared, it is simply pedantry that will despise it. The style, constructively perfect in itself, contained in itself the germ of all that was to come after. We cannot reach Köln and Westminster, except by the necessary stages of Spalato and Olympia.

We may for a moment sympathize with the pedants as we read the inscription of Jovianus at Corfu. Jovianus destroyed, and he put very little in the place of that which he destroyed. We treasure his work and his boast as pieces of history; but we must allow that art, as such, has no reason to thank him. But the case is quite different with the basilica of Olympia. Its architect may take his place alongside of those who did the bidding of Diocletian and Theodoric. He destroyed indeed, but he destroyed only to put to new uses. The shrine of the new faith was reared out of the very stones of the shrine of the old. The columns which, in a past state of things, had known only how to bear the dead weight of the entablature, were now taught to lift up the arch, as a living thing rising from their own substance. Enough is left of the basilica of Olympia to show that it might have held its own even among the basilicas of Ravenna. But at Olympia the name of Ravenna seems to awake no echo, to carry with it no meaning. In all accounts that we have seen the building is said to be Byzantine. That perhaps simply means that it is Christian and not heathen. Byzantine, in any architectural sense, the church assuredly is not. It is essentially basilican, without any Byzantine features. Nor can the date be late enough to be called Byzantine in any political sense. We may talk about Byzantine after the final separation of the Empires in 800; before that time the word leads to confusion. One cannot conceive this church to be later than Justinian’s time; it may well be earlier. When could such a building have been so utterly overthrown and swallowed up? We can think of no time so likely as the Slavonic and Avar inroads of Justinian’s own day and of the days of his immediate successors.

The church itself is a not very large basilica of the purest and simplest type. There is no dome, no approach to Byzantine arrangement, not even the chalkidikê or transept. Two arcades supported by the smaller columns of the former building, showing Ionic capitals of two types, led to an apse of which the arch of triumph has unluckily together vanished. But of the well-wrought cancelli, carrying the mind across the sea to St. Clement’s, a large part still remains. The apse has its windows divided by what at first sight seem to be coupled columns — the type which ranges from St. Constantia to the Moissac cloister — but which really form a single block within and without. The walls are of brick; several of the windows are preserved, and in their jambs we see long stones set upright, just as in the primitive work both of England and Ireland. Everywhere we find these witnesses to the universality of the earliest form of Christian architecture. The pavement contains many inscribed stones of various dates. Some are Pagan, recording votes of the city of Elis in the days of the early Emperors; some are Christian, as that which records the zeal of a certain pious reader ἀναγνωστής towards the making of the pavement itself. To the west of the nave is a range of Ionic columns forming the portico, but their arches or entablature has perished. But to the south-west is an attached building where alone the arches are preserved. They are set on the Ionic columns with an intervening stilt set crosswise in a most ingenious fashion. The column becomes a mid-wall shaft.

Such a building, on such a site, found in such a case, suggests thoughts which bring all the ages of the world together. The old glory of Olympia passed away; free Elis — whatever we say of free Pisa — no longer gathered the competitors of free Hellas from Massalia to Trapezous to strive in a national solemnity before the national gods of Hellas. But Olympia lived on as long as the Roman masters of Hellas clave to the gods of Rome, and saw the gods of Rome in the gods of Hellas. A day came when the lord of Rome cast away his faith alike in Zeus of Olympia and in Jupiter of the Capitol; a day followed when a later prince forbade either worship, when the games of Olympia ceased as a rite of the forbidden worship, when her temples were forsaken or destroyed or made into materials for new temples of the new creed. Presently barbaric invasions swept away the new temple and the old alike. Zeus was still worshipped on Tainaros; St. Andrew still helped his votaries at Patras; but the temples, pagan and Christian, of the Olympian Altis lay hidden and forgotten, and the hill of Kronos looked down on solitude instead of on the great religious centre of the Hellenic race. Ages after, the zeal of strangers working on Hellenic ground brings to light the ruins of the pagan temples, and with them the ruins of the Christian Church. We rejoice in both discoveries; only let it be remembered that each alike is part of the history of Hellas and of the history of man. We will at least believe that there is no fear that the recovered church of Olympia may share the same fate which the narrowness of classical barbarism decreed for the ducal tower of Athens.