Delphi, the navel of the world on the slopes of Parnassus

On the southern slopes of Parnassus, in Phocis, a natural amphitheatre of cliffs called the Phaedriades opens onto a valley of olive trees that runs down to the Gulf of Corinth. Here stood Delphi, the Panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo. Even before its oracle, famous throughout the Mediterranean, Delphi strikes visitors with its landscape: a place where architecture and nature seem to work together to inspire awe, as they did for the ancient pilgrims who climbed the Sacred Way.

The omphalos and the centre of the Earth

The myth relates that Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the world and that they met precisely at Delphi, thus marking the centre of the Earth. The spot was indicated by the omphalos, the navel, a dome-shaped stone. The Delphi museum keeps a famous marble copy decorated with a net in relief, probably of Hellenistic or Roman date, which conveys the idea of an object venerated as the hinge of the world.

Another tale, told in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, explains the name Pytho by which the place was also known. Apollo killed the serpent Python, guardian of the site, and the monster's body rotted in the sun. From that episode came both the title of the priestess, the Pythia, and the Pythian Games, held every four years and second in prestige only to the Olympics.

The Sacred Way, the treasuries and the temple

The sanctuary of Apollo is still walked today along the Sacred Way, which zigzags up among the remains of the treasuries, small temple-shaped buildings with which Greek cities displayed their devotion and their wealth. The Treasury of the Athenians, rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century with its original blocks, preserves on its walls inscriptions including two hymns to Apollo with musical notation, among the most important testimonies of ancient Greek music.

The temple of Apollo we see today is the one rebuilt in the fourth century BC, after an earthquake. According to authors such as Plato and Pausanias, maxims attributed to the Seven Sages were inscribed in its pronaos, including «Know thyself» and «Nothing in excess». Higher up are the theatre, which could hold several thousand spectators, and the stadium, where the athletic contests of the Pythian Games took place.

Castalia and the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia

Between the two cliffs of the Phaedriades flows the Castalian spring, in whose waters pilgrims and priests purified themselves before entering the sanctuary. Later poets considered it sacred to the Muses. A little further down, in the area called Marmaria, lies the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, with the tholos, an elegant circular building of the fourth century BC of which three columns have been re-erected, now one of the best-known images of ancient Greece.

From ruin to rediscovery

The sanctuary declined in the imperial age and was abandoned with the end of pagan cults. On the ruins grew the village of Kastri, which at the end of the nineteenth century was moved to allow the Grande Fouille, the great excavation conducted by the French School at Athens from 1892. It was then that the Charioteer of Delphi came to light, a bronze statue of the fifth century BC, today the jewel of the museum. A World Heritage Site since 1987, the site keeps its evocative power intact.