Olympus stopped being only a home for gods in 1913, when a Greek guide and two Swiss travellers stood on top of it.
The first recorded climb
Christos Kakkalos, a local hunter, guided the Swiss climbers Frederic Boissonas and Daniel Baud-Bovy to the summit of Mytikas, the range's highest point at 2,918 metres, on 2 August 1913. Kakkalos went on to become the mountain's best-known guide for decades afterward. Mytikas is a narrow, exposed rock summit, and reaching it still requires scrambling rather than a walk.
Greece's first national park
In 1938 the Greek state declared Olympus the country's first national park, protecting its forests, gorges and alpine zone. Refuges built through the twentieth century turned what had been a serious mountaineering objective into a two or three day hike open to well-prepared walkers, with the summit ridge remaining the technical exception.
A mountain doing two jobs
Olympus is now simultaneously a protected ecological reserve, a hiking destination marketed on the strength of its mythology, and the literal high point of the country whose religion once placed its most powerful gods on this specific summit. Modern visitors climb the same slopes ancient Greeks mostly avoided, since approaching the gods' seat too directly was not the ancient impulse at all.