Throne of the gods
The family seat of Zeus. The highest peak in Greece. Routes for walker and scrambler alike. It’s divine!
ZEUS, WHO JOYS in thunder, made an assembly of all the immortals upon the highest peak of rugged Olympus. There he spoke to them, and the other divinities listened. Homer, The Iliad
Those words were first written down some 2800 years ago – and they were being narrated by Greek storytellers a long time before the advent of writing. The link between Mount Olympus and the gods is millennia-old. But my obsession with Olympus is slightly fresher. It started in 1992.
I was embarking on my A-levels, and they included a fantastic subject called Classical Studies, in which a magnificently inspirational teacher called Ged opened our eyes and minds to great works like Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Bacchae.
I adored it. For one thing, the ancient Greek sagas inform everything we know about drama, fantasy and superheroes to this day, so Classical Studies was the nearest I’d get to an A-level in Star Wars.
The other thing I liked about Greek lit was that it tended to involve mountains, and I loved mountains. Dozens of real-life peaks turn up in Greek myth: Cithaeron, Pelion, Ossa, Othrys, Ida, Parnassus… and above all, Olympus. The home of the gods. The daddy.
Homer (the poet, not the Simpson) speaks intricately of ‘rugged Olympus’ throughout The Iliad and The Odyssey. It forms the backdrop for the soap-opera antics of Zeus, Aphrodite, Athene and the rest of the gods. If they’re not seducing mortals to get back at each other, they’re whipping up hurricanes to manipulate human events to their advantage. And they do it all from atop their cloudcapped mountain HQ. What’s not to like?
And today, having researched Olympus over the intervening decades, I’ve come to realise that it’s not just a great mountain to climb if you like Greek literature. It’s a great mountain full stop.
First of all, location: lying on the Aegean coast in the north-east corner of mainland Greece, it’s easily accessible from Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. Being so close to the coast, you can dip your toes in the bright blue sea before and after you climb it. Win!