Bridging Two Shores of the Ancient with the Rio-Antirio Bridge

    The Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge (named after the politician who came up with the idea for the bridge), or the Rio-Antirio Bridge as it is familiarly known, is a structure of contradictions.

    It is the world's longest spanning cable-stayed bridge - a specific bridge design where the bridge deck is held in place by cables spanning from the towers (pylons) of the bridge, and stands in defiance to nature's forces in an otherwise idyllic, rather ancient setting. It is both a sign of mankind's will to overcome nature, and a symbol of advancement in a country that gave birth to most ideas of the Western civilization.

    Charilaos Trikoupis envisaged a bridge to connect the two sides of the Gulf of Corinth - once called the Gulf of Lepanto, an inlet of the Ionian sea that is surrounded by Greek mainland on almost all sides. However, he didn't live to see the structure he dreamed of come to life; in fact he died 108 years before the bridge was completed and opened to traffic. The building of such a bridge would remain a dream for Greeks for the entirety of the 20th century, until architect Berdj Mikaelian designed the one we witness.

    The dream was not without cause. Aside from being a source of pride, the bridge would make accessing the Peloponnese peninsula significantly easier - until the completion of the bridge this was only possible through the isthmus of Corinth near Athens.

    Construction for the 2880 meter long bridge, built by the French construction giant Vinci as part of a consortium, started in 1998. Site preparation and mobilisation took until the turn of the millennium, and building of the pylons - the towers that are to carry the bridge's weight - started in 2000. The deck, which allows four lanes of traffic in two directions, was completed between 2003 and 2004, with the bridge opening to traffic in May of the same year.

    The contruction was not without its difficulties, obviously. With the strait it were to span prone to earthquakes, soft ground (i.e. loose sediment), tsunamis, and tectonic plate shifts, as well as water depth reaching 65 meters, many engineering solutions were to be devised for the bridge to come into existence. And into existence it did come, after 6 years and over 600 million euros being spent.

    Today, the consortium that built the bridge operates it under concession. The bridge not only spans a strait once-burdensome to cross, but also connects people of an ancient civilization to today and future through marvels of engineering and architecture.