Continued from yesterday”¦ Delphi and the oracle were established before recorded history. It is believed that in the early days, the people communicated with and worshipped the goddess Gaia, but by the time Greece was a mighty empire, they had replaced Gaia with the god Apollo. It is believed there were a number of other gods worshipped there in between. The building pictured above that we kept referring to as the “oracle building” is actually a temple dedicated to Apollo. The oracle itself is actually a priestess, chosen in her teen years to serve most of her life, who sits in the temple and feels the presence of the gods. She gyrates and murmurs incoherently as the gods speak through her, and the murmurings are translated by priests. In this aspect, the “300” was pretty close, except the priests weren’t mutants.

People came from all over the known world to consult the oracle. The prophecies were usually carefully worded so that the meanings could be interpreted several different ways, and because of that, the prophecies were seldom wrong. There seemed to always be an interpretation that would accurately apply, whatever the outcome. For example, King Croesus of Lydia asked if he should go to war against Persia. The oracle told him that if he crossed a river then he would destroy a great empire. King Croesus did initiate war and crossed a river, and the Persians destroyed Croesus’ great empire.

In order to consult the gods via the oracle, gifts and an animal sacrifice were required. By the time the Romans took over, the streets of Delphi were lined with beautiful statues brought as gifts. People with more valuable gifts were prioritized over those with smaller gifts. The animal sacrifice was washed in a sacred pool of water outside the temple. If the animal shivered when wet, the gods were present and the animal could be slaughtered, then the oracle could give the prophecy. The shedding of animal blood was required to communicate with the gods. If the animal didn’t shiver, you had to come back another day when the gods were around to talk to you. The altar the animals were slaughtered on is also just outside the temple.

As the reputation of the oracle grew, so did the town’s wealth and power. A 12 member federation of independent Greek city-states (kind of like a League of Nations) was centered here. The town has a large theater just above the temple on the hill, as well as a stadium above the temple that was famous for chariot races. This is the theater with the temple below it. The second photo is of the view of the mountains below Delphi, but it still doesn’t give you the full sense of how high up in the mountains Delphi really is.

In addition to the fore mentioned statues that once lined the street, there were several treasuries erected by the various city-states as thank you’s to Apollo and the oracle for assorted successes, especially in battle. The best preserved is the Treasury of the Athenians.

As a result of these treasuries, Delphi became the de facto Bank of Greece. Sacking of these treasuries by the Macedonians, and later the Celts, and later the Romans, added to Greece’s downfall to Rome. In 83 BC, an earthquake damaged Apollo’s temple. Later, barbarian invaders burned it. In 66 AD, the Romans took 500 of the best statues in Delphi back to Rome. As time marched on, the Delphi continued to be looted and continued to erode, but the oracle functioned until 395 AD, when it was ordered closed by the emperor of the Roman/Byzantine empire, who deemed it non-Christian. The city was abandoned for 100 years, and then Christians began to move into the area and created a permanent settlement.

Below Apollo’s temple is a row of small, single rooms. The walls are made of small stones, unlike the rest of the ruins on the site that are made of large stone blocks. There are lots of crosses on and around the small rooms. Irini explained to us that after the Romans took over, they built this series of small shops to sell assorted goods to the people seeking advice from the oracle. When the Christians moved into the area, they used these little rooms as confessionals. Hence the different construction and all the crosses. Since the shops were added after the hey-day, they are not portrayed in the model above.

There were quite a few more groupings of stone blocks around the site, but we haven’t mentioned them because we weren’t sure what they used to be. Most of them were probably once treauries.  

Once we had finished up our tour of the ruins, we went to the museum, located just outside the excavation site. The museum houses the statues, pottery, tools, jewelry, pieces of reliefs from the exterior of assorted buildings, and so forth that have been discovered amongst the ruins. The display starts with small figurines made by the Mycenaeans that date as far back as 1400 BC. Despite the fact that Delphi’s art and wealth had been essentially completely looted by the time it was closed down, they still managed to find quite a lot of impressive pieces at the site. In fact, you begin to wonder what the “good” pieces the Romans took looked like if these amazing pieces were rejected by them. Here are a couple pictures of some larger statues in the museum. The second one is from the early 6th century BC. We forgot to write down the date of the first one, but it was likely earlier.

One of the last and newest pieces in the museum is this famous bronze sculpture of a chariot, another piece we remember studying in school. The statue of the man standing is only a small piece of a much larger work. Next to it is the drawing of what the full sculpture once looked like. The statue of the man is absolutely huge, much bigger than a regular human. And he is actually only a small piece within a much larger sculpture. We mention this to help give you a sense of just how fancy and elaborate the statues on the streets of Delphi really were. And to make you think just how much the people revered the oracle to build such a huge and heavy piece of art and schlep it up a big huge mountain. Unfortunately, we were never able to get a clear shot of the statue and drawing. Too many tourists in the room with us. But hopefully, despite the people blocking the drawing, you still get a sense of size and shape.

After the museum, we were taken back to the hotel, where we had 23 hours of free time. Wow. We have never been on an organized tour with so much time to ourselves. Like the ski town, the modern town of Delphi is terraced on the mountain. Our hotel was located at the end of the middle terrace. Check out the view.

We went down to the terrace below and found a restaurant to have lunch at. After lunch, we wandered down the street to the other end of town, then up to our level and back to the hotel. It is definitely a tourist town. Just about every building is a hotel, and just about every shop is a restaurant or sells souvenirs.

We had a leisurely evening and went to bed early, which was nice because we had been out late the night before with John and his friends.