Consulting the Oracle

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Once again it was difficult to travel back in time to appreciate the site with so many people around, both us and the other tourists. My anticipation was that it would still feel like a holy site but reality was more like a circus with thousands of tourists yacking and walking around with guides speaking in many languages from every 'corner' of the Sanctuary. It is unfortunate that they can't protect the artefacts in situ rather than having the sites sitting naked and the gems of friezes and statues in sterile rooms in the museum as it must have been an incredibly intimidating journey up the Sacred Way, past all the fabulous votives of the 'rich and famous' of the day. An ordinary petitioner must have spent the whole trip up the Sacred Way wondering whether their question was really worthy of the Oracle or whether they were bothering the Gods with trivial matters and may be made to pay dearly for doing so when they reached the Temple of Apollo.

And then there was the entrance to the Temple itself! Passing under the statues of Apollo in front of the Temple and moving to the broad ramp and the huge columns with Apollo's arrival on a chariot with his mother, Leto, and sister, Artemis, moving across the pediment above your head. Then to run the gauntlet of the statues inside the pronaos before you could finally petition the Pythia. Wow! I wonder how many humble petitioners turned tail and ran before they reached that point?

It was amazing to see the inscriptions left on the wall 2000-3000 years ago by people who followed the Sacred Way up to the Temple and those insciptions are still mostly legible today even though the writers' only tools were primitive stone or metal! They must have toiled incredibly hard to leave a mark that is still visible today.

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