The wider area of Mount Olympus
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How it came to be
Mount Olympus, on the border of Macedonia and Thessaly in northern Greece, is the country's highest mountain: its summit, Mytikas, reaches 2,918 m only 20 km from the coast. The ancient Greeks placed the home of the Twelve Olympian Gods, ruled by Zeus, on its cloud- and storm-wrapped peaks. Homer in the 8th century BC made it the house of the gods in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Hesiod in the 7th century BC told in the Theogony how Zeus defeated Cronus and the Titans here.
At the foot of the mountain the city of Dion was founded in the 5th century BC, with its temples and sanctuaries facing the summit. From the 5th to the 2nd century BC it held the Olympia, a nine-day festival honouring the Muses, daughters of Zeus. On the peak of St Antonios, rescue excavations in the 1960s found an open-air sanctuary of Olympian Zeus, with coins from the 4th century BC onwards and many from the 4th and 5th centuries AD.
The first modern ascent of Mytikas was made in 1913. Olympus became Greece's first national park in 1938 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1981. The massif sheltered forest species through the ice ages and is a hotspot of Mediterranean plant diversity and endemism. In 2026 the mountain and the archaeological site of Dion were inscribed together as a mixed World Heritage property.
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