Years before French Baron Pierre de Coubertin would achieve the establishment of the Olympic Games as a modern, international athletic competition, the idea for the ancient Greek Olympics revival had been a one-man campaign of Greek poet, Panayiotis Soutsos. In the 1850s, Brookes in England and Zappas in Greece were among those who contributed to the birth of the first modern Olympics.
Soutsos Olympic Revival Vision
“Where are your Olympic Games?” the ghost of Greek philosopher Plato berates the modern Greeks in Greek Romantic poet’s, Panayiotis Soutsos’ “Dialogue of the Dead” in 1833. “Let the only contests that you have be those national games, the Olympics”, commands another ancient Greek hero, the Spartan general Leonidas in another of Soutsos’ poems.
Voicing a strong intellectual trend in the newly-founded Greek kingdom of defining the modern Greek identity in terms of the glories of ancient Greece, Soutsos puts his poetic Olympic revival vision in writing in a detailed memo to the Greek government in 1835. He proposes a one-week festival with competitions ranging from foot-racing and philosophy to chariot racing and sculpture, to be held in four modern cities to reflect the four major sites of the ancient Greek athletic circuit.
King Otto got mildly interested and set up in 1837 a Committee for the Encouragement of National Industry with the aim of holding every May agro-industrial contests and athletic competitions at the end of which the victors would be crowned with laurel wreaths. However, no Olympic events are held and Soutsos continued to campaign tirelessly throughout the 1840s and 1850s.
William Penny Brookes and the Wenlock Olympics
While Soutsos was campaigning for the birth of the first modern Olympics, doctor and philanthropist William Penny Brookes revived the ancient Greek Games, or rather tried to emulate the Olympic ideals, in the small English village of Much Wenlock, Shropshire. A philhellene, Brooke named the Games “Olympian” and aimed at the “moral, physical and intellectual improvement” of the working class.
The first Annual Wenlock Olympian Games were held in 1850 and consisted of nine events, namely cricket, football, quoits, high jump, long jump and three races. Laurel wreaths and cash prizes were given to the victors. The Wenlock Games continue to this day with different events introduced through the years.
Father of modern Olympics, De Coubertin, attended the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1890 amidst a lot of pomp and pageantry put on in his honour and he was impressed by Brookes’ enthusiasm for the Olympics. Sadly, Brookes died four months before the first modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896.
Zappas and the Athens Olympics
In 1856, Soutsos’ Olympic vision finally found a supporter in the person of Evangelis Zappas, the wealthy Diaspora Greek, who had amassed a large fortune in Romania. Zappas promptly sent a letter to King Otto proposing the revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games at his own expense. Otto and his Minister for Foreign Affairs, Rangavis, agreed that “the proposal came from the heart and not from the brain and that it was impractical and verging on the ridiculous”.
However, an 1858 royal decree signed by Queen Amalia established the holding of quadrennial “Olympic Games”. The First Olympiad, or “Olympia”, was sponsored by Zappas and attended by King Otto and Queen Amalia but was a failure. It was intended to be an Agro-Industrial Exhibition combined with athletic events. However, it was poorly organised and received negative reviews from the Athenian press.
The success of the Second Olympiad of 1870 was followed by the fiasco of the 1875 one, where “everything assumed the colour of comedy”. Nevertheless, all Athens Olympic events together with the Wenlock Olympics contributed to the birth of the modern Olympic Games. However, there would be a lot of controversy until the Olympic Games as an international athletic competition would become reality in 1896.
In 1859, a foreign observer wrote of her impressions of the first Olympiad: “the passive, almost indifferent way in which [the people] looked on... gave me the impression that the time for these things is over in Greece”. She could not have been further from the truth.
Sources:
David Young, The Modern Olympics. A Struggle for Revival, John Hopkins University Press: London & Baltimore, 1996.
Michael Llewellyn Smith, Olympics in Athens 1896: The Invention of the Modern Olympic Games, Profile Books 2004.
M. Theodosopoulos, “The Contribution of Intellectuals to the Olympic Revival”, Kathimerini, 23 May 2004 (in Greek).
Fredrika Bremer, Greece and the Greeks. The Narrative of a Winter Residence and Summer Travel in Greece and its Islands, vol. I, trans. Mary Howitt, Hurst and Blackett: London 1863
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