Στάδιο - Stadium - Στάδιο - Stadium

Beautiful ancient stadium in very good condition. Only its original occupants are missing.

Wonderful space, perhaps even better than the ancient Olympia, which improves every year as the restoration of the ancient Messini continues and reveals its old glory.

A magical place, an incredible restored Greek stadium that gives the idea of ​​how majestic the games played in those days must have been! Not to be missed if you pass by Messene!

o The Stadium and the Gymnasium now belong to the impressive building complexes in terms of maintenance. It has the shape of a horseshoe, with stands and stairwells, the seats of the prominent and the numbering of the cornices with ancient Greek letters and with the addition of Roman protective walls at the bottom, after it had been transformed into an arena in those years. The horseshoe-shaped northern part of the Stadium includes 18 stands with 18 rows of seats, separated by stairwells. It is surrounded by Doric arcades, the columns of which mostly stand in place. The north portico is double, the east and west are simple. Around the stadium are preserved the columns from the High School that cover a large area that includes galleries, palaces, rooms, mosque, propyla. There were statues of high school students, lists of teenagers but also many inscriptions and votive offerings from which important information is extracted. The galleries, which belong to the High School, constitute a single architectural ensemble with the Stadium. The west portico seems to continue to the end of the track and is interrupted at a length of about 110 meters from its northern end. It is connected with a peristyle Doric-style atrium, about 30 meters long, which can be identified as a palaestra. In the Hellenistic era, the Gymnasiums became busy centers of public life of the city and places of exhibition of important works of art as evidenced by the recent findings of the Gymnasium.