NEMEA, Greece - “The first year of excavation we started digging by hand. We didn’t know how deep we were going to have to go, but we ended up going almost seven metres in depth and it was very frustrating because we didn’t find anything for 12 weeks,” Classical Archaeologist Stephen Miller from University of California in Berkeley and Director of Nemea Excavations told New Europe on 25 July 2013, pointing at a photo from 1974.
We've been walking around Nemea for hours, looking at stuff, the Nemea Museum, the Temple of Zeus, baths, and ancient accommodations for visitors, and he's full of energy despite the heat. We briefly seek shelter in his air-conditioned office at the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games to look at old excavation photos, including the one from when excavation begun.
“I was going to have to go back to Berkeley and show people this empty hole and say, ‘You gave me money last year, give me more money to dig another hole. But the very last day, we found a little stretch of the water channel down here and then we dug out into the ramp and found a little stretch of the starting blocks. And that last day was the 19th of July of 1974; the next day Cyprus was invaded. One night we were celebrating and the next day we thought war was coming,” Miller says, who spent a career unearthing ancient history.
“At any event, with that experience in hand and having found nothing in here, we could come in with the machine. The Caterpillar Tractor Company of Peoria, Illinois, helped us out with a machine and dug the overburden and then we dug the last metre or so by hand,” he says.
Miller excavated the stadium and then led to the revival of the ancient Nemean Games in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012.
The ancient Greeks celebrated festivals at Nemea that were part of the cycle of games at Delphi, Isthmia, and Olympia. At each one of these four locations in rotation, for a brief period each year, during a sacred truce all Greeks – Spartans and Athenians, Corinthians and Argives, Macedonians, and Cretans – gathered for games.
Moments later, I follow Miller through the tunnel to the ancient stadium, feeling the distant past like the ancient athletes heading from the quiet dark passage to the bright jab of light.
The Olympics, which are best known today, were the big games even in antiquity. “Theoretically, they were all the same. If you were an Athenian and you won either in Olympia or Delphi or Isthmia or Nemea, you got a free meal every day for the rest of your life. Pindar wrote odes for Olympic victors and Pythian victors and Isthmia victors and Nemea victors so there was equality there. But in one of his odes written for a victor the Isthmia Games, Pindar says, ‘And I hope he gets a victory at the Olympics, too,’” Miller says, referring to the ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. “So they were a little bit better. They were 200 years older. There was precedence that way,” he added.
The other thing about the ancient Olympics and the reason they were more popular in antiquity than the other games was that at Delphi and Isthmia and later on with the Nemean Games, they were musical competitions, Miller says. The victors were decided by a panel of judges, who could skew things their own way because the criteria were subjective. But at the Olympics they were just the athletics. “And you saw which javelin went the further, you couldn’t fix it. It was an element of impartiality and objectivity that made the Olympics always a bit better,” Miller says.
He noted that there is a growing interest in the revival of the Nemea Games. “People find out more about the Nemea Games. What we are doing now is providing a supplement to the Olympics. The Olympics are important, let’s not hide behind our fingers. The Olympics do something very important for our world. But they also have gaps. And one of the gaps is that, I won’t speak for you, but I could never participate in the Olympic Games because I’m not a good enough athlete. But I can come to the Nemean Games and take off my shoes and run like an ancient Greek down the track,” Miller says.
There is a physical contact on the day of the Nemean Games. “There is a sense of community, of family, of people getting together. It doesn’t matter if you speak the same language or not, you can sympathise ... Our problem is going to be, we’re very close to our limit of the size we can accommodate. This is all done with volunteer labour. If we had the resources we could probably do the Nemean Games every year. I think we would have the people to come for that, Miller says. “In 2012, we had over 240 volunteers doing various jobs. They just rolled up their sleeves and pitched in,” he added.
“We have two principles: One is authenticity; we try to be an ancient as we can. The other is participation; we don’t care if you enjoy watching, but we want you to enjoy participating, being a part of it. That means we have to provide the opportunity for as many as people as possible as quickly as possible to get their feet dirty with ancient dirt,” Miller says.
According to a myth, the death of the infant Opheltes was the cause of the foundation of the ancient Nemean Games. The baby had been set down on a bed of wild celery when a snake killed him. Hence the crown victory at Nemea was made of wild celery.
Miller noted that the Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games is also now in the process of trying to form a School of Ancient Athletics.
Miller noted that, regardless with the Nemean Games, there has developed a sort of indigenous tourism. “An Athenian family with their kids would come looking here, go to the stadium and then go to a winery. Last year for a period of time the site of the museum was closed on Saturdays and Sundays,” Miller says, grilling his teeth.
“I made a fuss, other people made a fuss. But the people who really made a fuss were the winemakers because they had people who were coming from Athens to see the site and then go to the winery and they would go to the winery and say, ‘Why is the site closed?’ They were very unhappy,” Miller says, adding that it was their muscle that opened the museum on weekends. “There was one Saturday nine buses came and people could not come in. I mean, take advantage of what you got guys,” Miller quipped.
This is especially important as Greece counts on revenues from tourism to pull out of a deep economic crisis. Miller says the economic crisis has affected tourism but not to the extent he expected. “I think the reason for that is that Nemea is new. Many people who have come to Greece in the past haven’t come to Nemea. And now they hear about Nemea and they come here. So our tourism levels are down but not as down as I would have anticipated. And, I have to say, that in the spring we had tremendous tourism. They were times when there were nine or 10 buses on any given day and some of them were Greek school kids but there were also a lot of non-Greeks who were here as well. More recently it has been a little quieter,” Miller says.
He says visitors come from all over the place. “We’re getting up to 50,000 to 60,000 visitors per year as Nemea gets more known,” he says.
He noted that Greece is recovering. “In this village most people are farmers and grow things that people eat and drink and yes the prices are lower but they are coming through. It’s not that they don’t have any jobs. It’s that they don’t pay as well as they had been. We’re not starving here,” Miller added.
Miller says he is optimistic Greece will pull through. “Greeks had been around for thousands of years. There’s have been ups and down. People like to complain. I grew up in a little town in Indiana, a little farming village, and people always complained. But the situation was never as bad as they thought,” he says.
Miller noted that Greece has changed tremendously since he arrived in Nemea in 1973. “It has been extraordinary to watch. When I first got here there were many houses that had no electricity. There was only house that had a car,” he says. “The cafenion had a television and that was it. Nobody else had a television. The second-third day I was here, the mayor came in and said, ‘I want you to be our guest tonight at the cafenion.’ The chairs were all lined up looking at the TV set and I was put on the front row. And then ‘Peyton Place’ came on. Here I was on the front row while everyone was watching ‘Peyton Place’ and all the women were outside looking through the window at this point. It has been a big change, an extraordinary change. I can’t believe the speed at which the changes have taken place – that’s economics,” Miller says.
“Money became easy in Greece. But with that came some excesses, too. Greece went from a cash economy to a credit card economy. And it never stopped off at the checkbook economy. Growing up in America and I think other countries as well, we had checks. We had to pay our bills with checks. And every month we had to sit down and balance the checkbook to make sure you had enough money to cover the checks that you were writing. That process disciplined you - made sure you did not spend more than you could. But when you moved from cash to credit cards, the credit cards say spend as much as you like, it’s all too easy,” Miller says.
Miller also conceived the quest to reconstruct the Temple of Zeus as part of his ongoing efforts to preserve the Ancient Nemea site. “At that time there were three columns, period. Since that time there have been a number of discoveries and the construction of this museum and instead of three columns there’re now nine columns for the temple,” he says. “I never planned to do this but in 1984 we begun to put up these two columns, we stopped for economic reasons, but we were able to start again in 1999 and we put these two columns up and then we continued around the corner – the whole corner of the building is displayed. I should also say that all the work that was done here was done by the University of California at Berkeley through the School of Classical Studies with the Ministry of Culture,” Miller says. “You’ll hear from my voice that we did not depend on government money either from the United States or from Greece or any place, it was mostly private money,” he added.
He said he considers Greece his home now and feels proud. “I have Greek citizenship, I pay taxes. I have been in Greece for so long,” he says.
Earlier in the day, I visited Ancient Corinth where I met Guy Sanders, Director of Corinth Excavations. A Brit, Sanders, has now continuously lived here for 25 years and, like Miller, considers Greece his home.
He told New Europe that excavation is going on continuously. “The Greek Archaeological Service is being digging down in the plain for the new railway to Patras and also the widening of the highway and they found incredible amounts Archaic, Classical, even Mycenaean tombs and a large part of the Mycenaean settlement and this is adding hugely key amount of culture stored around the village but it means the museum has to expand,” he says, adding that they added a new gallery in the museum and that these new findings could help to bring in new interest. “We are also doing restoration, reconstruction of a medieval monument,” he says. “Tourists would be able to understand what medieval life was like in Corinth.”
“If we bring in all the interested parties which is going to be tourism, local politics, national politics, the Greek Archaeological Service but also the excavators, we can work together to make this a kind of hub for archaeological tourism in the area and I can really see in 10-20 years’ time tourism and wanting to stay in hotels because there is so much to see,” Sanders says as we walk by Temple of Apollo.
“They come to Corinth and they say, ‘Wow we better go to Heraion, we better go to Nemea, we better go to Perachora, we better go to Isthmia and then they can go on to Nafplio for a gelato afterwards,” he says.
He added that a lot could be done for sustaining eco-tourism in the area. “A lot of people who come here are with University groups, mainly from America but I also do high school groups, students in Britain who are doing classics Latin-Greek or just in translation. But that only goes so far. Much more important is getting regular tourists here and hooking into something they enjoy seeing and having their imaginations fired up, some of them will come again,” Sanders says.
He strives to get the awareness out there. “And there are lots of really wonderful, didactic museums being set up under the auspices of Piraeus Bank like the Olive Oil Museum in Sparta, the [Open Air] Water-Power Museum in Dimitsana [Peloponnese], which are wonderful museums but under-visited at the moment because they’re not publicised enough. I think more needs to be done to push the cultural side of Greece over the lying-on- the-beach or getting-drunk-in-Matala side of Greece,” he says, referring to the trendy beach community in Crete.
Tourism at Corinth has dropped off over the years. “I remember seeing 20 tour buses at any one time at the parking lot here. I think we got to find a formula to start bringing these people back again,” Sanders says.
Asked if the economic crisis contributed to the fall, he says he doesn’t think the economic crisis did as much harm as the way media portrayed the protests that were going on in Athens.
“It was a huge image problem. Especially Americans were afraid to come to Greece because they though somehow they were going to be torched. This was purely negative advertising. They imagined it was going to be something like Cairo or Taksim Square in Constantinople. Now that things settled down a bit in terms of the demonstrations and the economy is seems to be fixing it is really noticeable tourists are coming back. You can see it in the number of buses. I can see it in the number of tours I give to university groups. People are coming back and it is slowly building up I hope for the better,” Sanders says.
At Ancient Isthmia, Jean Perras, Administrator of University of Chicago Excavations at Isthmia, told New Europe, walking past the Temple of Poseidon and the stadium that tourism has been slowing down because of the economic crisis. “But there at the archaeological sites in Greece there has always been a lot of interest,” she says. “We have schools coming and they do enactments.”
Local business owners also think that Greek tourism needs to reach its potential.
Dimitris Mitzithras, a hotel owner in Loutraki, told New Europe that Korinthos and Loutraki are not as well known to foreigners as they should be. “It is a major destination for Athenians but unfortunately it is not as well known abroad. It has huge geographical significance with Loutraki as a base that provides a beautiful long beach and for me you can combine it a visit all the archaeological sites of Greece within one day.
Marilena Stathopoulou, who owns a hotel in Kalamaki beach near Isthmia and three hotels in Athens, told New Europe she is fortunate that 80% of her hotels are full. Being family owned hotels, decisions are made easier. “I like to spend time with the clients,” she says, adding that many of the tourists are repeat visitors.
Back to Ancient Corinth, Sanders says that he is much more optimistic now about Greece making it out of the crisis than 5-10 years ago. “As painful as these things are, these kinds of issues that very much hold over us since the Byzantine Empire had to be addressed sooner or later, especially in the context of being a member of Europe. It’s been too long that we’ve been the victims of politics as usual up in Athens with tax avoidance and all the other issues we’ve been facing. Now that one hopes coming to grips with those issues perhaps we can look to Greece getting stronger economically rather than continuing to be weak,” Sanders says.
He also stressed the importance of religious tourism. “I’d say 50% of our tourists are basically here for the Apostle Paul. In recent years most of the interest has gone into St Paul in Corinth,” the Director of Corinth Excavations says.
Assistant Director Ioulia Tzonou-Herbst told New Europe that she is also optimistic. “Seeing that the tourism is picking up with the support of the Europeans should help Greece. If they really don’t believe we’re the bad Greeks and they’re keeping coming to Greece because of the sun and the monuments and everything, then it’s going to help the economy, it’s going to help everybody. They’re going to have a good time and we’re gonna get the revenue we need to boost our economy,” Tzonou-Herbst says.
There is also discussion about the new European package which is more directed towards the use of the space rather than the infrastructure of the spaces in the archaeological sited because money has been put here in Corinth from the European packages to restore monuments, she says. One of the major monuments has religious connotations and now there has been an effort to give the three-dimensionality of the monument and maybe explain more how the space was used in relationship to St Paul. “But I think the new package is more about creating programmes and interactive programmes and more materials to be used in the museum so the visitors understands the function of the spaces and the use of the objects in antiquity,” she says.
At Nemea, Miller says that people can all learn some things from the Ancient Greeks. “That’s why I’m here,” he says, adding: “It’s frustrating to see the same mistakes made in 5th century BC made today. If George W Bush had ever read Thucydides United States would never had invaded Iraq because he would have seen what happened to the Athenians when they invaded Syracuse”.
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