Mount Olympus

Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, rising to 2,917 metres at its Mytikas summit near the Gulf of Thermai, on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia. It is a real massif of limestone peaks and gorges, protected since 1938 as Greece's first national park. Its summit was first reached by climbers in 1913.

In Greek myth Olympus was the dwelling of the gods and the site of Zeus's throne. The twelve main deities were called the Olympians after it. Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, says that 'the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus' made the first, golden race of humans. Homer places the gods' bronze-floored halls there, built by the smith god Hephaestus.

Ancient writers sometimes treated Olympus as a physical mountain and sometimes as a heavenly realm above it. The Prose Edda's Asgard plays a similar role in Norse myth.