Day Thirteen

Saturday, July 9th

Today is the day I touched an ancient column!

The first thing we did was go to the stadium of Nemea. People didn’t stay here to build a town, but it was the center for one of the biggest gatherings. The athletic games- one of the four that really mattered- was held here every two years for my man Zeus.

The first area people were in was as shelter building with poillars for the athletes and their trainers. Here the athletes would put olive oil all over themselves. They then went through a path to enter the stadium. At this point Barnes made a joke about fingers with sea urchins in them, but I don’t remember it. Everyone laughed at my pain though.

Nudity was confined to events, baths, and your own home. The Romans thought Greeks were weird for doing all these things while nude. But anyways, they would walk through this tunnel nude. The tunnel was in tact and is still full length at 36 meters. This was one of the first examples of Greek vaulted architecture. The stone has a lot of ancient graffiti. While waiting to come out athletes would write stuff like names. This as all built in the 4th century.

The Nemea games were revived in 1996 and they have them every four years! All foot races, they run them barefoot still but not nude. I think they should do it in the nude. Go for it, y’all.

People got whipped for cheating. It was intense. Colin won the race on that day and poor Kenny hurt his foot. The races are no joke!

Nemea is one of four Panhellenic sanctuaries. A lot of people reference Heracles with Nemea, but there are actually no signs that people worshipped him here. There are signs of lions though, which blew my mind because I didn’t know lions were in Europe.

The sanctuary here was abandoned for 75 years, in 4th century the game came back here, unknown who brought them back. There is a sanctuary for Zeus here. There was a guy found in the tunnel and he’s in the museum. In the museum there is also some family tombs and lots of pottery, gold, and jewelry. There was evidence from a lot of people coming to Nemea, mainly Peloponnese and mainland, some from Italy and Sicily and North Africa. No evidence of people coming from Crete. But how cool is it how far people traveled in ancient times, just to worship? It blows my mind.

The temple itself was from 330. It used all forms of columns and was one of the first to do that (so it’s extra cool I got to touch them!)

Nemean Zeus appeared to be different from others, possibly.

Early Christians actually left three columns up because of the Holy Trinity. They wanted all of the iron and everything in them, but they wanted to honor whoever they could. When the temple was built in the 4th century, the alter became even longer. Also saw a bath house, but it’s rectangular instead of circular which was very unusual. They actually used hydraulic cement and the bath house was pretty intense. I don’t really understand bath houses from back then, hell I barely understand modern plumbing, but it seemed cool and they had aqueducts. And I touched columns. Nemea is dope.

After this we went to our third winery of the trip. I bought a bottle of wine here and really enjoyed the food and our time, mainly because I had a ton of wine here. After this we went and stayed at our hotel in Olympia. The pool at Olympia was nice and a lot of us just played in the pool and messed around. The best event of the night, though? Katie used her pimple popper to get my sea urchin out! It was so painful, but it’s gone! I can use my dominant hand now! Today was great! I touched a column, drank wine, and rid myself of a sea urchin! Greece is awesome!