Visiting Olympia and it’s old stones

After a couple of days living on different spots during March 2022 in Greece, I thought that it is time to go and have a closer look at some old stone.

Back in school when I started “learning” latin, my interest for Greek mythology was born. Up to now, I just remember barely the first lesson of Latin, but I remember quite a lot of stories about the Greek gods etc. If you want to get a taste, I can recommend the book Mythos by Stephen Fry. It follows a quite interesting, fresh and different approach of telling Greek mythology. You’ll see.

In the morning I’ve been nearly alone in the whole area of ancient Olympia and so I took quite some time to explore it. The weather has been great, the flowers were flourishing and the wing beats of the insects were filling the air.

When I was walking around, investigating these old stones and trying to imagine how they’ve looked in the past, I had an idea. I googled for images that recreated the broken buildings etc. And by that I found the app Ancient Olympia. You can take a virtual tour through the whole place and what is more, you can use it’s augmented reality function to lay the virtual recreations on top of the broken originals. I had a lot of fun with it. And if you can’t visit Olympia right now, you may give it a try to have a brief look.

When I’m walking around these old places, I’m always excited and wondering what life was like at that time. And because I like a lot of the ideas that are described by Stoicism, I had a closer look at this statue of Marcus Aurelius. This guy was one of the biggest Stoics ever. At least he had written a lot about it. If you want to have a closer look at Stoicism, I recommend reading the summary of Stoicism on reddit. I really loved reading it and from my point of view it’s an fantastic summary. What is more the guys on reddit are discussing a lot what a Stoic approach on the challenges of their lifes would be.