Olive wreath
sports award
The olive wreath, also known as kotinos (Greek: κότινος), was the prize for the winner at the ancient Olympic Games. It was a branch of the wild olive tree Elaia Kallistephanos that grew at Olympia, entwined to form a circle or a horse-shoe. The branches of the sacred wild-olive tree near the temple of Zeus were cut by a pais amphithales (Ancient Greek: παῖς ἀμφιθαλής, a boy whose parents were both alive) with a pair of golden scissors. Then he took them to the temple of Hera and placed them on a gold-ivory table. From there, the Hellanodikai (the judges of the Olympic Games) would take them, make the wreaths and crown the winners of the Games.
History
According to Pausanias it was introduced by Heracles as a prize for the running race winner to honor his father Zeus. In the ancient Olympic Games there were no gold, silver, or bronze medals. There was only one winner per event, crowned with an olive wreath made of wild-olive leaves from a sacred tree near the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Olive wreaths were part of the iconography of the founding of the modern Olympic games, with imagery that has the wreath connecting the ancient practice and dates with the events in 1896. Olive wreaths were given out during the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens in honor of the ancient tradition, because the games were being held in Greece which was also used as the official emblem.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olive wreath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.