On The Road – Athenaze and Ariobarzanes – In the Footsteps of the Marathonomachoi: Walking the Athens Marathon (Part 2 of 2)

The Athens Marathon is infamous for “The Hill”. Beginning just before the halfway point of the course, “The Hill” is a sustained climb of about 210 meters over 13km of distance. The high point, at an elevation of 247m, sits in a saddle between the north tip of Mount Imittos, visible here in the distance, and the southernmost spur of Mount Penteli, which lurks off-camera to the viewer’s right.

In an absolute sense, “The Hill” is really not that much of a climb for anyone who hikes regularly. But as part of a 42km walk at a fast clip, it becomes surprisingly exhausting. We overtook a number of of runners from the previous starting group as we made our ascent, even though our own pace definitely fell off.

The race becomes much easier once participants cross the saddle between Imittos and Penteli. From that point onward, the remaining 10km of the route are downhill: participants enter the Attic Plain (or Athens Basin), defined in the east, north, and northwest by a crescent of mountains (Imittos, Penteli, Parnitha, and Aigaleo) and in the southwest by the Saronic Gulf.

Within the plain itself, a line of rocky hills—including the Acropolis—runs roughly southwest to northeast, from the Saronic most of the way to Mount Penteli. This photo captures two of the peaks of the Tourkovounia, the largest and northernmost of these hills. Peaking over the top of the Tourkovounia, and just visible in the hazy far distance, is Mount Aigaleo.

In antiquity, of course, almost all of the Attic Plain was under cultivation, and the city of Athens was a tiny walled urban area at its south end. Now, the Attic Plain is relentlessly urban, occupied entirely by Greater Athens—really, a sprawling conglomeration of several dozen municipalities that occupies about 3000 square km and houses more than 3.5 million people.

Less than 2km from the finish line, participants in the Athens Marathon pass a monumental sculpture made of jagged glass sheets, now known as “the Runner” (o Dromeas). Created by the sculptor Kostas Varotsos in 1988, it now stands across the street from the Athens Hilton, not too far from the National Gallery. Originally, however, it was known under a different name—“the Stranger” (o Xenos)—and it stood in Omonoia square, the northernmost apex of Athens’ downtown triangle. It was moved to its present location in 1994 to protect it from ongoing damage caused by subway traffic and construction under the square. The name change seems to be purely a product of how people responded to the statue, which looked to most like a runner in motion.

The scale and style of the sculpture aroused controversy in the 1980s. Now, however, it offers welcome encouragement to marathon participants struggling to complete the last little portion of the course.

Yours truly, with bib numbers scrubbed for a modicum of privacy, and looking far more chipper than we felt at 40.75km. This is probably the best picture of us taken by the professional race photographers, who clustered at a couple of different points along the route. We’re both proudly wearing our official Athens Marathon jerseys and the olive branches handed to us by a kind old man at the Tomb of the Athenians.

The last few hundred meters of the race descend gently down Odos Irodou Attikou (Herodes Atticus Street) toward the valley where, throughout antiquity and until relatively recently, the Ilissos River flowed freely on its way from the slopes of Mount Imittos toward Phaleron Bay. These days, the once-proud river has been channeled and covered; in this section of the Ilissos valley, it lies below Leophoros Vassiliou Konstantinou (King Constantine Boulevard).

Although the river has been covered, the surrounding blocks remain verdant. In part, this is because Herodes Atticus street is bordered on one side by the well-landscaped Presidential Palace and on the other by the National Gardens. Even in antiquity, though, the valley of the Ilissos was famed for its plane trees, under which people like Socrates and Plato spent many an hour on leisurely strolls outside the city walls.

The race ends, appropriately enough, in the stadium constructed for the 1896 Olympic Games, when the modern marathon race was born. The all-marble stadium—an elongated horseshoe open on one end, known locally as Kalimarmoro and elsewhere as the Panathenaic Stadium—was built on the ruins of a much older stadium, commissioned in the second century CE by Herodes Atticus (after whom the nearby street is named). An Athenian who also held Roman citizenship, Herodes Atticus climbed high in the Roman imperial administration, and—like many other Greeks of his time—showered his hometown with expensive philanthropic gifts. Those gifts included the stadium, which was intended to host the games of the Panathenaic Festival (one of the most important events in the religious calendar of the ancient Athenians). The modern stadium, which seats about 50,000 people, is relatively true to the scale and design of the original.

Because we often stay in the nearby neighborhood of Pangrati, we have wandered passed the stadium hundreds of times. Even so, entering the stadium at the end of the race was a surprisingly moving experience. Late though we were (it took us about seven and a half hours to walk 42km), there were still people in the stands to welcome us in, give us treats, and award us our medals!

The stadium is nestled snugly between two hills that rise above the valley of the Ilissos River. A few days after the race, we climbed the westernmost and tallest of the two hills, Ardittos, which is home to a sadly neglected park and trail. The summit of the hill commands impressive views over the stadium toward Mount Likavettos (one of the many rocky hills that rise from the Athenian plain) and the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki, which tumbles down the mountain’s flank.

The view, however, was not the main reason we climbed Ardittos. Instead, we were drawn by the trace remains of an ancient temple, dedicated to the goddess Tyche (Fortune), and originally built as part of Herodes Atticus’ stadium complex. There, on one of the few weathered stones that still survive from the original structure, we dedicated the olive branches that we had carried from Marathon as gifts to the goddess—both in gratitude for a successful race, and as a plea for luck in the four years to come.