The Olympic torch relay first took place in 1936, at the Berlin Summer Olympics.
The relay began on 20 July 1936 in Olympia, Greece, and carried the flame to Berlin for the Games. It covered about 3,187 kilometres through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia, with 3,331 runners taking part over 12 days and 11 nights.
A common mix-up is the Olympic flame itself. A symbolic flame had burned at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and again at Los Angeles 1932, but those flames were lit at the stadium. The 1936 Berlin Games introduced the modern relay, in which runners transport the flame from Olympia to the host city.
The relay was devised by Carl Diem and became a permanent Olympic tradition. Its first edition also has a complicated political history: Nazi Germany used the ancient-Greece imagery and the highly organized journey as international propaganda. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl recorded the relay for her 1938 film Olympia.