Elements of the ancient Olympics have inspired the modern Games, including preliminary ceremonial rituals. However, the Olympic flame torch relay is not an ancient tradition. The evening before the athletic festival began in Olympia, there was a grand procession into the sanctuary. Two days before, the athletes and their trainers, festival officials, judges (Hellanodikai) set out from the polis of Elis (where the athletes had assembled and trained) for the sanctuary some 35 miles away. They were accompanied by trumpeters and heralds.

We can imagine that given the late arrival, those in the procession might be carrying torches, but though the procession itself was considered a pilgrimage to a sacred festival held in a sanctuary, the torches were not considered symbolic.

Fire at the ancient Olympics

Fire was an essential component of the ancient sanctuary nonetheless, and not only as a source of light and heat. The sanctuary of Olympia was a large complex of buildings, and one of them was the Prytaneion. This functioned as a kind of HQ for the festival officials, who likely stayed there for the duration. Victors of the events also dined at celebratory banquets here. It featured an altar dedicated to Hestia the goddess of hearths, upon which a flame was always burning. All fires, including sacred flames on other altars in the sanctuary, were lit from this one (Drees 1968, p. 124).

The sacred fire in the Prytaneion didn’t just constantly burn during the festival, it burned throughout every day of every year. It didn’t need a lighting ceremony because of this, and besides, its location meant that it wasn’t visible to the thousands of people who descended onto Olympia for each festival.

It should be pointed out here that an eternal flame wasn’t unique to Olympia; many cities and sanctuaries had one, including Delphi, Athens, Ephesos, and Priene. They too were housed in a Prytaneion in the city, where they acted as a communal hearth (koine hestia.) So there was an eternal flame at Olympia, but that was a fairly standard practice, didn’t need a ceremony, and wasn’t on public display.

One ceremony that was very publicly ostentatious was the sacrifice of a hecatomb (100 bulls) at the great altar of Zeus near the Temple of Hera. It wasn’t part of the opening ceremony, however, it took place in the middle of the festival. At dawn, a solemn procession started out from the Prytaneion to the altar, where someone who had lit a taper from the sacred flame of Hestia now waited to light the pyre that had been erected on the altar. Hymns were sung, libations were poured, and the cattle were cleansed and prepared for sacrifice. The priests slit the throats and cut up the meat, with the best parts probably being taken away to be cooked.

Following the tradition that Herakles once sacrificed to Zeus on that same spot, the thigh bones were piled on the pyre just as he had, and the pyre was lit from the taper brought from the sacred flame. Gods, not fond of mortal food, were supposed to appreciate the smoke and the gesture. Pausanias tells us that the ashes from the wood and bones from the sacrifices was taken to the Prytaneion, where, on a specific date, they were mixed in with water from the river Alpheius which was thought to be favoured by Zeus (5.13.11). The resulting paste would be plastered onto the altar, and despite weathering, the ash altar was reported to have grown and grown over subsequent festivals.

So this was a suitably grandiose affair that might provide inspiration for a modern revival; only large sacrifices and ash altars weren’t unique to Olympia either. Pausanias mentions comparable altars at Pergamum and Samos specifically (5.13.8).

So we definitely have evidence for a sacred, continuous flame at Olympia, and evidence for a great fire being lit in a ceremony at Olympia, even if neither were unique to Olympia and the Games held there. But there is clear inspiration for some kind of facsimile, for anyone who wished to cash in on the cultural cachet of antiquity.

Modern Olympics

The Games in Berlin were actually the third modern Games to incorporate the idea of an eternal flame. In Amsterdam, the Marathon Tower was constructed and a symbolic flame burned at the top for the duration of the 1928 Games. This made it very conspicuous, compared to the flame in the Prytaneion, and any ancient would have been horrified at the concept of extinguishing it at the end of the Games.

However, it was part of a concerted effort to evoke antiquity in the modern Games, a trend that started with their revival (Miller 2023, p. 85). A similar flame was incorporated into the 1932 Games in Los Angeles.

The Third Reich

The first modern use of a torch relay from Olympia was for the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin. If the date and location don’t give it away, this was the Games held during the Nazi regime in Germany. Berlin had won the bid to host the Games two years before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, so the bid was not a Nazi endeavour, but the Games did align with Nazi ideals of athleticism.

Hitler, on the advice of Goebbels, was keen to present the Third Reich in the best light possible, given that delegates and spectators from across the globe would be visiting Berlin. As well as building brand new sports venues, Hitler was keen to appropriate antiquity to lend his Games, and by extension his regime, some much needed credibility.

The Nazis already had a fascination with ancient Greece and the Peloponnese in particular, believing that the Dorian Invasion was actually an Aryan invasion of southern Greece. In other words, the Spartans and their ilk were, as far as the Third Reich was concerned, perfect Nazis. No wonder that Hitler was so keen to evoke as much imagery from the ancient Games as possible. The flame had already been re-imagined, but the Nazis never could resist the opportunity for bombastic ceremonies. Their solution was to add a torch relay, all the way from Olympia to Berlin, to build up anticipation and excitement.

However, the idea wasn’t Hitler’s, nor anyone in the Nazi government. They were the creation of Carl Diem, elected to the post of Secretary General of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games 5 days before Hitler was elected as Chancellor, and Alfred Schiff, an archaeologist and sports official who had even acted as a referee in the first modern Olympics in Athens.

Diem was married to a Jewish woman, and Schiff was Jewish, having lost his job on the German Olympics committee in 1933 due to his religion. The men were close friends, and Diem used his position to keep Schiff as involved with the Berlin Games as he could, including hiring him to curate an exhibition about Greek athletics at the Pergamon Museum, albeit keeping his contribution anonymous. Schiff told his colleague about ancient torch races, such as the lampedophorus race at the Panathenaic Games (Miller 2023, p. 154).

This race wasn’t a relay, and was an event rather than a ceremony. But the imagery was too tempting not to replicate, and Diem set about creating a modern equivalent. Knowing that Hitler was supporting and funding the Games only because it was a good opportunity for propaganda, Diem was well aware that he needed to produce an event that would placate and please the Führer. Schiff’s idea of a mammoth torchlit race across Europe was the ideal solution (Borgers 2003, p. 11).

And so a concave mirror was set up in ruins of Olympia, utilising the rays of the sun to light the first torch. Athletes, all firmly Aryan, each carried the torch for a kilometre, all the way from the Peloponnese to Berlin. The event was filmed by Nazi propagandist extraordinaire, Leni Riefenstahl. The spectacle was an impressive success, pleasing Hitler greatly. It has been performed prior to every Olympics since.

Schiff died in 1939, before he could fall victim to the antisemitic Nazi regime, and his family swiftly fled to England. His myriad contributions to and involvement in the 1936 Games were suppressed due to his faith, and remain largely unacknowledged. Despite this, his legacy, though anonymous, is nevertheless considerable. As Peter Miller writes: “It is the torch relay, devised for the 1936 Games, that relies most heavily on Olympia’s perceived role as a place of athletic memory” (2024, p. 17).

Diem, despite marrying a Jew, survived the war. The torch relay would not be his last (mis)appropriation of antiquity; as the Soviets marched on Berlin in 1945, Diem addressed the Hitler Youth, urging them to make a last stand as the Spartans had done at Thermopylae (Lennartz and Buschmann 2012, p. 29). His reputation has been the subject of fierce debate ever since.

Conclusion

The sacred flame at Olympia did not need to be ceremoniously lit for the ancient games, and was hidden from public view, though a pyre on the altar of Zeus was ceremoniously lit as part of a wider ritual. Flames were processed throughout the sanctuary as necessary, though not by athletes running in a relay.

The concept of a flame lit for the duration of the modern Games was first introduced eight years before Berlin hosted their Games, and Hitler and his cronies were not responsible for inventing the ceremony at Olympia nor the torch relay to the host city. That was the sole brainchild of a most fervent admirer of the ancient Games, a Jewish archaeologist named Alfred Schiff.

It is for these reasons that we have rated this claim as misleading.