Delphi

For the ancient Greeks, Delphi was the navel of the earth, the point where two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the world were said to have met. From the eighth century BC until late antiquity, kings, cities and ordinary pilgrims climbed here to put their questions to the Oracle, the priestess Pythia who delivered Apollo's cryptic answers from within his temple. The sanctuary grew rich on their offerings, and the ruins that survive record centuries of ambition set into the mountainside.

The site sits on the southern flank of Mount Parnassus, roughly 180 kilometres northwest of Athens, looking out over a vast sea of olive trees that rolls down the Pleistos valley to the Gulf of Corinth at Itea. It divides into two sanctuaries either side of the modern road. The larger Sanctuary of Apollo is reached by the Sacred Way, a stone path that zig-zags past the treasuries of rival city-states to the great Temple of Apollo, and on up to a remarkably preserved theatre and, higher still, the stadium where the Pythian Games were held.

Below the road, in the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, stands the Tholos, a graceful circular building of the fourth century BC whose three re-erected Doric columns have become the emblem of the site. Nearby the Castalian Spring, where pilgrims once purified themselves, still runs from a cleft in the rock.

The adjoining Delphi Archaeological Museum houses the finds, and it is essential: the bronze Charioteer, the twin kouroi Kleobis and Biton, the Sphinx of the Naxians and the reconstructed friezes give the bare ruins their faces and their colour.

Delphi was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987, as much for its landscape as its stones. Most visitors come as a day trip, basing themselves in the modern village of Delphi immediately west of the site or in nearby Arachova, and combining the ruins with the surrounding mountains and the gulf below. Give the site and museum together the better part of a day, and start early in summer before the heat and the coaches arrive.