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Did you know that the Corinth Canal in Greece was planned and built by Hungarians?
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Hungarians helped to design and build the canal, which was a millennia-long dream do Greek people, so their work is commemorated even today. And did you know that there was a Greek billionaire who gave 20 thousand more forints for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences than its founder, István Széchenyi, the “biggest Hungarian”?
Connecting the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea (strictly speaking two of their neighbouring gulfs) at the meeting point of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and the mainland of Greece was a millennia-long dream for Greek people. The first to propose such a project was the tyrant Periander in the 7th century BC. However, finally, he constructed, instead, an overland portage road on which ships could be tossed from one gulf to the other. Remnants of this “Diolkos” still exist next to the modern canal.
Afterwards, many rulers thought about building the canal, for example, Diadoch Demetrius Poliorcetes, Julius Caesar, Caligula and Nero. Interestingly,
Nero did not only speak about the project but he also broke the ground personally with a pickaxe and removed the first basket-load of soil in 67 AD.
The Roman workforce, consisting of 6,000 Jewish prisoners of war, started digging 40–50-metre-wide (130–160 ft) trenches from both sides, while a third group at the ridge drilled deep shafts for probing the quality of the rock. The latter were reused in 1881 for the same purpose. A memorial of the attempt in the form of a relief of Hercules was left by Nero’s workers and can still be seen in the canal cutting today. But nothing else remained of the grand project.
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When Greece gained its formal independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, a statesman Ioannis Kapodistrias, asked a French engineer to tell how much building a canal would cost for Athens, but the sum was so high (40 million gold francs) that the project was immediately abandoned. A fresh impetus came when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, so the Greek parliament accepted a law authorising the construction of the Corinth Canal.
