A bus ride away from Katakolon is Olympia, a bustling prospering tourist town. A short walk from the town center is the Olympia archeological site.

The site of Olympia is haunting. It was a place that enforced a limited peace every few years by threatening divine vengeance, and it worked for centuries. The site is enormous. It suffered invasions and earthquakes; both could be dealt with because gravity is gravity, and stones fall around where they start out - they can be put up again.What the site could not survive was Romans. In the early 400s AD the Eastern Roman emperor was persuaded that the proletariat were not as loyal as they should be to the official Christian faith; they were worshiping the old gods on the side, a kind of insurance policy. To put a stop to this he ordered that all pagan sites of any significance were to be destroyed, and Olympia practically defined 'pagan site'. The Romans really knew how to destroy things. They didn't just pull it all down - t hey broke up the pieces and then scattered them around so that no one could possibly put them back together again. There's no recovering from that.

There's at least one structure on the site that's older than Olympia. There's another story here that no one remembers.