Beschrijving
The spectacular Panathenaic Stadium remains one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions and is a shining beacon of modern Athens. Following several transformations over its long history, it eventually became the home of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 and remains the only stadium in the world built entirely out of marble.
Beginning in the late 5thcentury BC when the great orator Lycurgus sought to build Athens an appropriate venue to host sporting events as part of the Panathenaic Games, one of the city’s major celebrations. The stadium originally had a rectangular shape that was typical of ancient Greek stadiums (such as in ancient Olympia and ancient Epidaurus) and would be used for the first time in 330BC.
By the 20th century, locals came to call the venue “Kallimarmaro” (made of fine marble) and continue to do so today. The word “stadium” comes from the ancient Greek measure of length, where one “stadion” was approximately 185 metres and equivalent to the length of the track.