Why Olympic Champions Wore Olive Wreaths (And Won 5,600 Litres of Oil)

At the ancient Olympic Games, victory was not marked by gold medals or prize money. It was marked by a crown of olive leaves — and, at least in Athens, by a fortune in olive oil so large it could reshape a man's life.

The story of how olive oil became the currency of athletic excellence begins with a single tree.

The Sacred Tree at Olympia

In the sacred grove at Olympia stood a wild olive tree known as the Elaia Kallistephanos — the "olive of beautiful wreaths." According to legend, Hercules himself had brought the original cutting from the land of the Hyperboreans, a mythical people who lived beyond the north wind, and planted it in the sanctuary of Zeus.

This was no ordinary tree. It was tended with reverence, protected by law, and considered the direct link between the gods and the athletes who competed in their honour. Every four years, when the Games approached, the tree's branches would be harvested for the single purpose of crowning champions.

The harvesting was a ritual in itself. The Hellanodikai — the official judges of the Games — would cut the branches using a golden sickle, a detail that elevates the act from agriculture to ceremony. These branches were then carried into the Temple of Zeus, where they were woven into wreaths by hand.

The wreath, called a kotinos, was the only prize awarded at Olympia. There was no silver for second place, no bronze for third. You either wore the olive crown or you went home with nothing. In a world that measured worth in livestock, land, and grain, this seems almost perversely austere. But the wreath was never meant to be a material reward. It was a symbol of divine favour — proof that Zeus himself had witnessed your excellence.

What the Wreath Actually Meant

To modern eyes, a crown of leaves might seem modest. To an ancient Greek, it was anything but. An Olympic champion returned home to a hero's reception. Cities sometimes demolished a section of their walls to welcome the victor — the idea being that a city with such a champion had no need of fortifications. Champions received free meals for life, front-row seats at public events, and a status that bordered on the sacred.

The olive wreath carried all of this meaning because the olive tree itself carried meaning. It was Athena's gift to humanity, the tree that had won her the patronage of Athens. It was a symbol of peace, endurance, and civilisation. To wear a crown made from its branches was to wear all of that on your head.

But if Olympia offered only symbolic rewards, Athens took a decidedly more practical approach.

The Panathenaic Games: Where Glory Met Commerce

Starting in 566 BC, the Panathenaic Games — held every four years in Athens — offered something the Olympics did not: material prizes. And those prizes were measured in olive oil.

The oil came from Athens's sacred olive groves, trees believed to be descended from Athena's original gift on the Acropolis. It was collected, certified, and stored in distinctive black-figure amphorae known as Panathenaic amphorae — tall, elegant vessels decorated on one side with an image of Athena and on the other with the relevant sporting event. These amphorae were themselves valuable objects, and hundreds have survived in museums around the world.

The quantities involved are staggering by any standard.

The winner of the chariot race — the most prestigious event — received 140 amphorae of olive oil. Each amphora held roughly 40 litres. That is 5,600 litres of premium olive oil awarded to a single victor.

To put that in perspective: 5,600 litres is more olive oil than most families today would consume in several lifetimes. In the ancient world, where olive oil was used for cooking, lighting, bathing, medicine, and religious ritual, it was a liquid fortune. At contemporary market prices, a Panathenaic chariot victory would have been worth more than many estates.

Other events paid handsomely too. A boxing champion received 60 amphorae — 2,400 litres. Runners, wrestlers, and pentathletes all received proportional shares. Even second-place finishers walked away with substantial quantities.

The Economics of Ancient Athletics

The Panathenaic prize system reveals something important about the ancient Greek economy: olive oil was not merely a commodity. It was a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a marker of social status all at once.

An athlete who won multiple events across several Games could accumulate enormous wealth in oil alone. This oil could be sold, traded, or gifted. It could fund political careers, finance marriages, or establish a family's fortune for generations. Ancient athletics, for all its talk of glory and honour, was also enormously profitable.

The connection between sport and olive oil ran even deeper than prizes. Athletes trained by rubbing olive oil into their skin before exercise — it was believed to warm the muscles and protect the skin from the sun. After training, they scraped the oil, sweat, and dust from their bodies using a curved bronze tool called a strigil. This residue, known as gloios, was collected and sold as medicine. According to Pliny the Elder, it was used to treat everything from swelling to haemorrhoids, and could command extraordinary prices.

Even the act of competing was inseparable from olive oil. It was on your skin when you fought, in the wreath when you won, and in the amphorae when you went home.

A Symbol That Endured

The tradition of the olive wreath did not end with antiquity. When the modern Olympic Games were revived in Athens in 1896, organisers chose to echo the ancient precedent. And when Athens hosted the Olympics again in 2004, the victory wreaths were woven from branches taken from the ancient olive tree of Vouves in Crete — a tree estimated to be between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, still bearing fruit after millennia.

Those 2004 wreaths closed a circle that had been open for sixteen centuries. Branches from a Cretan olive tree, placed on the heads of modern champions, connecting them across time to the athletes who once competed in the shadow of Zeus's temple.

The olive wreath was never just a crown. It was a statement about what mattered — that the tree Athena chose over Poseidon's sea was worth more than salt water, worth more than gold, worth building an entire civilisation around.

On Crete, where olive trees have grown for over four thousand years, that statement still holds. The island's Koroneiki olives produce some of the finest extra virgin oil in the Mediterranean — the same liquid gold that once made champions rich and cities proud. At Eliato, we like to think every bottle carries a little of that ancient weight.