Right now you’re looking at a live webcam from the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, Greece – one of the most impressive ancient sites in the city and once the largest temple in Greece.
This online camera shows a real-time view of the Olympieion, as the sanctuary is also called. The ruins sit just a short walk south-east of the Acropolis and close to Syntagma Square, right in the center of Athens. The temple area is bordered by busy avenues like Vasilissis Olgas and Vasilissis Amalias, so on the stream you might notice both ancient columns and the modern city moving around them – cars passing, people walking along the fence, guides with small groups, school trips, all that everyday city buzz.
The star of this location is, of course, the temple itself. Originally there were 104 massive Corinthian columns, each about 17 meters high, built of bright Pentelic marble. Today, the live stream usually shows 15 standing columns and one fallen column, which has been lying on the ground since a storm in 1852. From above, that fallen one looks almost like a stack of marble coins.
Construction here started in the 6th century BC under the Athenian tyrants, but the project dragged on for centuries. The temple was finally completed only under the Roman emperor Hadrian around 131–132 AD, when it became one of the largest temples in the Roman world. Inside once stood a huge statue of Zeus and another of Hadrian, but those are long gone – what you see now on the online camera is the giant skeleton of the building, open to the sky.
Around the columns, the web camera sometimes catches other pieces of history: parts of the Themistoclean Wall, traces of Roman baths, and, very close by, the Arch of Hadrian, which marked the symbolic boundary between old Athens and the Roman-era city. On clear days, you can even guess the outline of the Acropolis hill in the background, giving you a neat visual link between different eras of the city.
