A tight fit ... only boutique cruise ships such as SeaDream I and SeaDream II can squeeze through the 25-metre wide Corinth Canal. |
Road and rail bridges cross the canal at various points of its 6.3kilomtre length. |
POSTED: 26 JUNE 2010
Nero's canal — 1800 years late, but an essential Peloponnese connection
Hoodwinking those whose support they need to keep them in power has been around since politicians first breathed air.
Way back in 67AD, when he sensed wealthy traders and shipowners were getting a bit toey, Emperor Nero made a grand promise with a flair of showmanship that would leave pollies of today floundering.
The fact that fulfilment of that promise would not come for more than 1800 years — in 1893 to be precise — was neither here nor there.
From as early as 700BC, Mediterranean traders had cursed an area of Greece known as the Peloponnese — a peninsula in the south of the country’s mainland that divided the Adriatic Sea from the Aegean.
For while the 16,000 square kilometres of the peninsula was one of the country’s richest and most valuable agricultural areas, it added some 300 kilmoetres — and often days to the sailing time around the infamously unpredictable Cape Maleas — to the lucrative trade routes between the two seas.
Many early rulers thought about digging a canal across the peninsula, but none was quite game enough to try it. They believed that Poseidon, the God of the Sea, opposed the joining of the two seas, and that if they dug the canal, Poseidon would allow the “higher” Adriatic to rush through like water down a plug-hole, and flood the “lower” Aegean.
Periander, the Tyrant of Corinth, temporarily got around the problem in 602BC with a stone roadway. Ships were hauled out of the Adriatic or Aegean, placed on wheeled carts and pulled by horses and slaves across the peninsula’s six kilometres.
Because of their weight, cargoes were removed and carried separately, and the ships reloaded and relaunched into the sea on the other side of the Peloponnese. It ended up as time-consuming and costly as sailing around the peninsula.
So in 67AD, with traders and shipowners making clamouring sounds about his leadership, Emperor Nero decided on a grand canal across the Peloponnese Peninsula.
But he didn’t announce it with just a simple court statement and the equivalent of today’s press release. Rather he waited for the approaching Isthmian Games, when he knew he would have an audience of thousands — including his business leaders.
With a massive audience present, Nero not only declared that he would have a canal cut across the Peloponnese Peninsula. With great ceremony he produced a golden spade, led his noblemen and business moguls to the site of his would-be canal, and dug the first sods of soil himself.
And not content with that, he then loaded this spoil into wicker baskets which he carried on his back and dumped with equal ceremony before no less than 6000 slaves he had recruited to dig the canal.
But that was as far as it got. Although his plans were for a canal 6.3 kilometres long, 25 metres wide and with an eight-metre depth of water, it also meant first creating a cutting up to 80 metres deep just to get down to water level.
And to complicate matters, three months later Nero — whose increasingly odd behaviour included giving three-hour lyre performances in theatres whose doors were locked so noone could leave before he’d finished — committed suicide. What little work had been done on the canal was abandoned.
It took centuries for the Greek Government to get serious again, but eventually construction began in 1890 on a canal at a place called the Isthmus of Corinth.
The project took three years to complete and included building two road bridges and a rail bridge across the canal, and, remarkably, at each end, roads on pontoons that “sank” into trenches dug a further several metres into the bed of the canal to allow ships to pass over them.
Today, the narrow and shallow Corinth Canal is still a vital link for smaller cargo vessels, boutique-sized cruise ships and pleasure boats seeking a short-cut between the Adriatic and Aegean.
The Peloponnese Peninsula provides a taste of true Greece, with aqua-blue waters lapping sunny beaches, patchworks of olive groves, vineyards and citrus orchards, ancient towns, monasteries, palaces, ruined castles and forts.
For information about holidaying on the Peloponnese, phone Travel Creations on 1300 550 727. They know all about it, as the owner’s family hails from there!
