Delphi is the ancient sanctuary of Apollo on the south-western slope of Mount Parnassus in central Greece, the seat of the Pythia, the priestess who spoke as the Delphic Oracle from at least the 8th century BC until the Christian emperor Theodosius I closed the site in the late 4th century AD. The Greeks believed it marked the centre of the world, the omphalos or “navel”. Today its ruins — the Temple of Apollo, the restored Athenian Treasury, a theatre for about 4,500 spectators, a stadium for 6,500 and the round Tholos of Athena Pronaia — make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 1987, and have lain within Parnassos National Park since 1938.
Why the Greeks Put the Navel of the World on Parnassus
According to the myth, Zeus wanted to find the centre of the earth, so he released two eagles from its eastern and western ends. They flew at the same speed, and their paths crossed above Delphi. To mark the spot, a carved stone, the Omphalos, was set up in the innermost chamber of the temple, flanked by two golden eagles. A carved marble omphalos, covered in a knotted net pattern, is displayed today in the Delphi Archaeological Museum, though it may itself be a later copy of the sacred stone.
The landscape makes the claim feel plausible. The sanctuary sits on terraces cut into a steep hillside below the twin cliffs of the Phaedriades, with Parnassus rising to 2,457 metres behind it. Below, the valley of the Pleistos river runs west to join the plain that reaches the Gulf of Corinth near Itea, where the port of ancient Kirra once received pilgrims arriving by sea.
Before Apollo, the site was linked to older powers. Aeschylus said the oracle first belonged to Gaia, the Earth, and the scholar H. W. Parke read Apollo’s killing of the serpent Python as the memory of a newer god taking over an older cult. The early name of the place, Pytho, survives in the priestess’s title, the Pythia.
Inside a Consultation with the Pythia
Most detail about a consultation comes from later authors, above all Plutarch, a priest of Apollo at Delphi around AD 100.
The oracle spoke for only nine months of the year; in winter, Apollo was said to leave and Dionysus to take his place. During the active months, consultations took place on the seventh day of each month, Apollo’s sacred day. The Pythia, a woman of Delphi who gave up her family life for the role, purified herself in the Castalian Spring and drank from the Kassotis spring nearer the temple.
Enquirers climbed the Sacred Way carrying laurel branches, paid a fee and brought a goat. Before any question was heard, the goat was sprinkled with water. If it shook the water off, the god was willing; if not, the session ended. A willing goat was sacrificed on the great altar paid for by the island of Chios, and the rising smoke signalled that the oracle was open. The Pythia then went down into the adyton, the sunken inner chamber, and sat on a tall tripod with laurel leaves and a dish of spring water beside the omphalos.
How she spoke is still argued over. One ancient tradition held that vapours from a chasm put her into a frenzy and priests turned her cries into hexameter verse. Joseph Fontenrose and Lisa Maurizio have argued that the sources actually show her speaking clearly in her own voice. From the 1980s the geologist Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and the archaeologist John Hale found two faults, the Kerna and the Delphic, crossing beneath the temple and proposed that sweet-smelling ethylene seeped up through them, although other researchers reject ethylene and suggest methane or other gases. The answers entered Greek history: Herodotus tells how the Lydian king Croesus was told that if he attacked Cyrus of Persia he would “destroy a great empire” — and the empire he destroyed was his own.
Up the Sacred Way, from Siphnos to Athens
The modern visitor follows the same route as the pilgrims: in from the Roman Agora at the bottom of the sanctuary, then up the zigzagging Sacred Way. Both sides of the path were once crowded with statues and with “treasuries”, small temple-like buildings put up by individual city-states to hold their offerings to Apollo — often a tenth of the spoils from a victory the oracle was believed to have helped win.
The Siphnian Treasury was paid for with a tithe from the silver mines of Siphnos, until the sea flooded the workings; fragments of its carved frieze are now in the museum. Argos built one of the largest, completed in 380 BC. Foreign rulers joined in: Croesus sent a golden lion weighing ten talents, and in return the Lydians gained the right to consult the oracle first.
The best-preserved building on the route is the Athenian Treasury, built entirely of Parian marble. Pausanias said it was paid for from the spoils of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, though scholars date its construction anywhere between 510 and 480 BC. Its metopes are the earliest known large-scale sculptures of the Athenian hero Theseus. French archaeologists reassembled it from its original blocks between 1903 and 1906; the metopes on the building are copies, with the originals in the museum. Just above it stands the Stoa of the Athenians, an Ionic porch built after the naval victory over the Persians in 478 BC.
The Temple of Apollo and the Polygonal Wall
The Sacred Way ends at the terrace of the Temple of Apollo. Ancient tradition described a series of legendary temples, one of laurel boughs, one of beeswax and feathers, and a third made by the gods Hephaestus and Athena. The first temple archaeologists can confirm dates from the 7th century BC and burned down in 548/7 BC. The Athenian Alcmaeonid family paid for its replacement, and that building was in turn destroyed in 373 BC. The foundations and re-erected columns visible today belong to the 4th-century BC Doric temple, built by the architects Spintharus, Xenodoros and Agathon.
The temple terrace is held up by the polygonal wall, built from interlocking irregular blocks to support the rebuilding after 548 BC. From about 200 BC its face became a public noticeboard: roughly a thousand inscriptions record the freeing of enslaved people, written as fictitious sales of the slave to Apollo. In front of the temple stands the Altar of the Chians, faced with dark marble over a limestone core and restored in 1920.
Theatre and Stadium Above the Sanctuary
Above the temple, the theatre sits in the natural slope of the mountain, with views over the whole sanctuary and down the valley. It was first built in the 4th century BC and remodelled several times, including in 160/159 BC with money from King Eumenes II of Pergamon and again for the emperor Nero’s visit in AD 67, when the orchestra was paved and the stage front decorated with reliefs of Heracles. The lower zone has 27 rows of seats and the upper zone eight, giving room for about 4,500 people. Musical and vocal contests of the Pythian Games were held here.
Higher again, at the top of the site, is the stadium. First laid out in the Classical period (sources differ between the 5th and 4th centuries BC), it received its stone seating and an arched entrance in the 2nd century AD under the patronage of Herodes Atticus. It held about 6,500 spectators, and its track is 177 metres long and 25.5 metres wide.
The Tholos at Athena Pronaia
About 800 metres east of the main ruins, past the Castalian Spring in the ravine of the Phaedriades, lies the lower sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, “Athena of forethought”, whom pilgrims passed on their way in. Its best-known building is the Tholos, a circular structure built between 380 and 360 BC. Its ring of 20 Doric columns had an outer diameter of 14.76 metres, with ten Corinthian columns inside. The Roman writer Vitruvius names its architect as Theodorus the Phocaean. What the building was for is not known. Three of the outer columns have been re-erected with part of the entablature, and with the cliffs behind them they make the Tholos the most photographed monument at Delphi.
The Pythian Games and the Charioteer
The Pythian Games were one of the four Panhellenic festivals, second in prestige only to the Olympics. In myth Apollo founded them after killing Python. In history, the Delphic Amphictyony — the league of Greek peoples that ran the sanctuary — reorganised them around the end of the First Sacred War, c. 586/582 BC, when they moved from an eight-year to a four-year cycle, held two years after each Olympics. Music came first: the festival originally centred on contests in music and the arts, and athletic events were added later. A sacred truce, announced six months ahead by envoys sent to every Greek city, let competitors and spectators travel safely. The games continued until at least AD 424.
The finest monument to the games is the bronze Charioteer of Delphi, a life-size figure 1.8 metres tall cast around 470 BC. The inscription on its base names Polyzalus, tyrant of Gela in Sicily, who dedicated a full group of chariot, horses and attendants after a victory in the Pythian Games of 478 or 474 BC. The statue survived because it was buried in the debris of the earthquake of 373 BC, and it was found in 1896.
From the Village of Kastri to UNESCO in 1987
In the centuries after the sanctuary was closed, a village called Kastri (“fort”) grew up over the ruins, its people mining the ancient stone for their own buildings. By the late 19th century it had about 100 houses and 200 residents. Excavation could only begin once the village was moved, which happened after an earthquake damaged it and the residents accepted a new village nearby — the modern town of Delphi. Théophile Homolle, director of the French School at Athens from 1891 to 1903, led the “Great Excavation”, and from 1893 his teams cleared vast quantities of landslide soil to expose the sanctuaries of Apollo and Athena Pronaia, along with thousands of inscriptions and sculptures.
UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Site of Delphi in 1987, alongside the Acropolis of Athens and a year after the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. For how Delphi fitted into a world of rival poleis, see our guide to the ancient Greek city-states; the mountains and gulfs that kept them apart are covered in the geography of ancient Greece; and the city that built the Treasury on the Sacred Way has its own monument in the Acropolis of Athens.