The major center where all Greeks converged to pay honor to their chief god was Olympia . Their quadrennial festival featured the famous Games . There was also an altar to Zeus made not of stone, but of ash, from the accumulated remains of many centuries' worth of animals sacrificed there . Outside of the major inter-polis sanctuaries, there were no modes of worshipping Zeus precisely shared across the Greek world . Most of the titles listed below, for instance, could be found at any number of Greek temples from Asia Minor to Sicily . Certain modes of ritual were held in common as well: sacrificing a white animal over a raised altar, for instance . Aside from local epithets that simply designated the deity to doing something random at some particular place, the epithets or titles applied to Zeus emphasized different aspects of his wide-ranging authority: In addition to the Panhellenic titles and conceptions listed above, local cults maintained their own idiosyncratic ideas about the king of gods and men . With the epithet Zeus Aetnaeus he was worshiped on Mount Aetna, where there was a statue of him, and a local festival called the Aetnaea in his honor . Other examples are listed below . With one exception, Greeks were unanimous in recognizing the birthplace of Zeus as Crete . Minoan culture contributed many essentials of ancient Greek religion: "by a hundred channels the old civilization emptied itself into the new", Will Durant observed, and Cretan Zeus retained his youthful Minoan features. The local child of the Great Mother, "a small and inferior deity who took the roles of son and consort", whose Minoan name the Greeks Hellenized as Velchanos, was in time assumed as an epithet by Zeus, as transpired at many other sites, and he came to be venerated in Crete as Zeus Velchanos, the "boy-Zeus", often simply the Kouros. .