Corinth Canal
Διώρυγα της Κορίνθου
Interesting facts
- Instead of digging, the ancient Corinthians built the Diolkos, a paved stone trackway on which whole ships were hauled overland across the isthmus.
- The Macedonian ruler Demetrius Poliorcetes dropped his canal plan after surveyors wrongly warned that the two seas lay at different levels and would flood the land.
- Julius Caesar is recorded by Plutarch and Suetonius as planning a canal here, but he was assassinated before any work began.
- In 40 AD Caligula had Egyptian experts study the route, and they repeated the old mistake, concluding the Corinthian Gulf sat higher than the Saronic Gulf.
- The finished channel runs about 6.4 km between walls of rock that climb to roughly 90 metres, cut at an angle close to vertical.
- There are no locks at all: both ends sit at sea level, and ships pass in one-way convoys, never meeting inside the cut.
- Using the canal spares ships a voyage of roughly 700 km around the Peloponnese.
- Although the canal was formally opened in July 1893, slipping banks held up regular navigation until November 1894.
- In April 1941 German glider troops seized the main bridge, British sappers blew it up, and an Italian railway battalion rebuilt it in just 25 days.
- Since 1988 the road crossings at Isthmia and Poseidonia have been submersible bridges that sink below the surface to let ships sail over them.
Why it is worth it
Emperor Nero personally struck the first blow with a golden pick in 67 AD, then put 6,000 Jewish prisoners of war to work digging trenches forty to fifty metres wide from both coasts at once, plus a separate crew boring test shafts down the ridge to check the rock. In roughly ten weeks they cut about 700 metres of the eventual channel — a tenth of the total distance — before Nero was declared an enemy of the state and killed. Work stopped, and nobody with both the money and the nerve tried again for eighteen centuries.
It sounds like a straightforward ditch, but the isthmus rock is largely soft marl that slumps whenever it gets wet, which is why landslides still close the modern canal for repairs several times a year — a problem Nero's engineers had already run into and modern ones still haven't solved. When the Hungarian engineer Béla Gerster finally finished the job in 1893, he was fighting the same slopes that had already beaten the Romans and, later, the Venetians, who scouted the route after taking the Peloponnese in the 1680s and also walked away.
The canal opened just as the ships that would have made it fabulously useful were getting too wide for it. At 21.3 metres at the waterline, it's one of the tightest navigable channels anywhere — in 2019 a cruise ship with a 22.5-metre beam cleared it with roughly a metre of water to spare on each side. So today it earns its keep less as a shipping shortcut than as a stage set: small cargo boats and cruise ships still thread through for the spectacle, and thrill-seekers pay to bungee jump off the old road bridge, 80 metres above the water where Nero's diggers once stood.
Good to know
Landslides from the soft isthmus rock close the canal for repairs several times a year — worth checking sailing schedules if you're hoping to see a transit.
Getting there
4 km from Kórinthos. Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH) is about 84 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Corinth Canal is a canal in Greece that connects the Gulf of Corinth in the Ionian Sea with the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea. Completed in 1893, it cuts through the narrow Isthmus of Corinth and separates the Peloponnese peninsula from the Greek mainland. The canal was dug through the Isthmus at sea level and has no locks. It is 6.4 kilometres in length and at 24.6 metres wide at sea level, it is impassable for many modern ships. It is currently of little economic importance and is mainly a tourist attraction.
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