Mount Olympus

Mount Olympus (Greek Όλυμπος [ˈɔlimbɔs]) is the highest mountain range in Greece. Made almost entirely of Mesozoic limestones, the massif is located on the east coast of Greece, in Macedonia (or Thessaly) not far from the village of Litochoro, about 20 km south of the town of Katerini. In Greek mythology, Mount Olympus is the seat of the Olympian gods.

The highest peak is Mytikas (also: Mitikas) (2918 m), followed by the peaks Skolio (2911 m), Stefani (2909 m, sometimes called the "Throne of Zeus") and Skala (2866 m). Between Skala and Mytikas is Kakoskala, a ridge over which Mytikas can be reached by easy climbing. On the secondary peak Profitis Ilias is the highest chapel of the Balkan Peninsula.

The mountain range has its very own flora and fauna. For this reason, it was placed under nature protection as early as 1938 and declared a biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1981. Since 2014, it has also been on the tentative list for inclusion as a mixed cultural and natural heritage site in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Name

There are different interpretations of the meaning of the name "Olymp". Olympus is translated among other things with "sky", "the shining", "the high" or "the rock". According to the lexicon of the modern Greek language by the linguist and philologist Georgios Babiniotis, the word is a pre-Greek place word of unknown origin, whose old meaning could simply have been "mountain". The German linguist Michael Janda, on the other hand, sees it as a genuinely Indo-European composite: *ṷolun-ph₂os is formed from *ṷel- "to enclose" and *pah₂- "to protect" and thus has the meaning "protecting the enclosure," referring to the function of Olympus as the world mountain separating mortals from the gods. In Turkish the mountain is called Semavatevi, which means "home of the heavens".

Mythology

In Greek mythology, a place called "Olympus" was the dwelling place of the gods and its summit was imagined to be filled with light. It represented, as it were, the concept of heaven in Greek mythology and was inhabited by gods, descendants of the gods and servants. In a narrower sense, twelve gods were considered the Olympian gods.

However, this mythical "Olympus" is not necessarily synonymous with the real mountain. In Homer's Odyssey, the term Οὔλυμπος Oulumpos is merely a general term for the dwelling place of the gods or also a synonym for οὐρανός, ouranos, the sky, but not a specific, real place.

In fact, as a result, in many ancient Greek places the highest elevations in the area were called Olumpos, e.g. the Uludağ, Lykaion, Tahtalı Dağı, or Cypriot Olympus.

It was not until the 5th century B.C. that Herodotus described the Thessalian Olympus described here as the dwelling place of the gods.