Dodoni lies twenty-two kilometres south of Ioannina, in Epirus, in a narrow valley at the foot of Mount Tomaros, six hundred metres above sea level.

It was the oldest oracle in Greece — older than Delphi — and for most of its life it had no temple at all. People worshipped in the open air, around a single oak tree.

The tree and the priests

The sanctuary belonged first to an earth goddess, and the worship of Zeus came later, brought by the Selloi, a people of Epirus, in the second millennium BC. Zeus was worshipped here with Dione, and the two of them were said to live in the oak.

Homer describes the priests of Dodoni as men who never washed their feet and slept on the ground. Later the oracle was served by priestesses called the Peleiades — the doves. Herodotus was told that the sanctuary began when a black dove flew here from Egypt, settled on the oak, and spoke with a human voice.

The god answered through the tree. Priests listened to the sound of the leaves moving, and to bronze vessels hung around the sanctuary that rang when the wind touched them.

The questions people asked

What makes Dodoni different from every other oracle is that the questions survive.

From about the sixth century BC, people who came here wrote their question on a thin strip of lead, folded it, and handed it in. Thousands of these strips have been dug out of the ground, and they are not the questions of kings.

They ask whether to marry, whether the child is his, whether to buy the land, where the missing blankets went, whether to keep sheep or take up trade. It is the most direct record we have of what ordinary Greeks worried about.

Pyrrhus and the end

The sanctuary grew into a proper complex under Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, in the third century BC. He built the theatre, one of the largest in Greece, seating somewhere between fifteen and seventeen thousand people, together with a stadium, a council chamber and temples.

At the end of the fourth century AD, under the emperor Theodosius, Christian basilicas were built inside the sanctuary and the sacred oak was cut down.

Dodoni was then lost for fourteen hundred years. An English traveller identified the valley in 1832, excavation confirmed it in 1875, and systematic work began in the 1950s.

What to see today

The theatre is what people come for. It has been restored over many years and it is used again for performances in summer.

Beside it stands the Sacred House, the temple of Zeus, which grew from a simple enclosure around the tree into a walled building in at least four stages. An oak grows on the spot today — not the original one, but planted where it stood.

Around them are the bouleuterion, where the council of the Epirote federation met, the stadium, temples of Dione, Aphrodite and Themis, and the foundations of an early Christian basilica.

Above the sanctuary is the acropolis, with its walls and gates, and a water cistern cut into the rock. Few visitors climb up to it, and the view down over the whole valley is the best on the site.

The finds are not here. The lead tablets, the bronzes and the votive offerings are in the Archaeological Museum of Ioannina, about half an hour away.