LATE 5TH CENTURY BC

To escape the midday heat, the philosopher Socrates and his pupil Phaedrus decided to venture out to an idyllic area outside the city walls. There, beneath a towering plane tree, the pair conversed about love and hate – as Plato, Socrates’ disciple would later describe, transforming their dialogue into his play Phaedrus. Beside them, the waters of the Ilissos River rolled gently by, flowing past temples, altars and shrines.

338 BC

The orator Lycurgus was elected for four years as Curator of the War Fund, a post he would keep for another two four-year terms after he managed to more than double the government revenues of the city and find money to build grandiose public works projects. The Panathenaic Stadium was created under his supervision, built in the sacred riverside spot close to Ilissos where Socrates and Phaedrus had sought quiet and shade. Athens now had an appropriate venue for sporting competitions held during the Panathenaic Games, one of the city’s great celebrations.

The stadium would be used for the first time in 330/329 BC.

A ravine between two hills was deemed the ideal site. Significant excavation work was carried out, transforming the natural cavity into a space for athletics, while the “theater,” i.e. the area for the spectators, was hewn into the surrounding clay slopes. The stadium had a rectangular shape, the typical form of ancient Greek stadiums also seen at Olympia and Epidaurus.

The land on which it was built belonged to Deinia, who gave it to the city, while the exorbitant construction costs were covered by major donations, such as the thousand pairs of oxen provided by Eudemus of Plataea.

2nd century AD

During the period of the Roman Empire, Athens was not a political power. However, for the duration of Emperor Hadrian’s rule (AD 117-135), intellectual and artistic expression flourished; the city acquired new, extravagant buildings, churches and wealthy mansions with gardens beside the riverbed of the Ilissos.

The stadium still had a plain dirt surface. Apart from sporting events, it also hosted animal fights, such as the historic event organized by Hadrian, involving 1,000 wild animals. Soon, however, the quarry on Mount Penteli, which had supplied material for the Acropolis monuments, would also provide its famous white marble for a complete transformation of the stadium, thanks to Herodes Atticus.

The son of an extremely wealthy, aristocratic Athenian family, the orator and sophist Herodes was one of the major sponsors of Athens’ various public works projects. The most important were the famous Odeon of Herodes Atticus, on the south slope of the Acropolis, and the Panathenaic Stadium, which changed drastically in appearance after two significant innovations. Firstly, its original rectangular shape of was adjusted to a horseshoe – typical of stadiums during the Roman Age – while the seating area for spectators was enlarged and veneered with brilliant Pentelic marble. Equally impressive was a three-arched bridge at the front of the stadium, which crossed the Ilissos and served as a monumental point of access for Athenians to make their way to the arena. Numerous marble statues also provided a lavish decor.

The stadium’s capacity exceeded 50,000 fans and historians of the time wrote that it represented a marble “miracle,” a work that was incomparable to anything of its kind in the world.

The Athenians, for their part, playfully teased that it rightly bore the name Panathenaic Stadium since it was built with money from all of the citizens. They were implying that, in financing the Stadium, Herodes had disregarded the wishes of his father Atticus for every citizen to receive an annual payout as a gift from the family’s vast fortune.

THE 19TH CENTURY

After centuries in the doldrums, the stadium returned to the spotlight in 1896 when it was decided that it would host the first modern Olympic Games. The reconstruction costs were far too high for the country’s own coffers, however, as the stadium was covered by tons of soil and had long ago been stripped of its valuable marble – for reuse in the construction of other Athenian buildings. The entire cost was instead taken on by a Greek benefactor, Georgios Averoff; but on one condition: the stadium would be rebuilt exactly on the foundations of the ancient monument, which were uncovered thanks to an archaeological excavation. The architect Anastasis Metaxas took on the project.

The reconstruction work became a race against time as it had to be completed in less than a year. In the summer of 1895, the stadium resembled a construction site, filled with stacks of marble slabs, wooden scaffolding, stone masons, laborers and sturdy horse-drawn carts carrying materials to and from 350 different mines. A total of 550 people were involved in the project. The snow that covered Mount Penteli at the start of 1896 made it impossible to fully complete the project with Pentelic marble, forcing the Hellenic Olympic Committee to cover the remaining parts of the Stadium temporarily with limestone statues and wooden benches.

6 APRIL 1896

The Panathenaic Stadium hosted the inaugural international Olympic Games, making it the celebrated place where the Olympics were revived in modern times. By 1900, the stadium was covered entirely in marble, prompting its new nickname “Kallimarmaro,” or beautiful marble. The Greek state honored Averoff by erecting a statue of him to the right of the stadium’s entrance, just as ancient Athens had honored Herodes by placing his tomb at the top of the hill to the left of the entrance.

2004

Athletes and spectators alike experienced moments of thrills and chills at the Panathenaic Stadium, which played host to archery and the finish of the Olympic Marathon.

Α true gem in the heart of modern Athens, the gleaming Panathenaic Stadium hosts cultural and sporting events, as well as being one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions.