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Photographs from the Athens 2004 Olympic Summer Games, capturing cultural activity around the Zappeion Media Centre and some of the unseen dimensions of the city

This is our last day in Athens. How quickly it has all happened! The morning is spent trying to arrange bags, then rushing to meet Lucy from the Olympic Truce but she cancels so we get back to the house. We do not leave for the ZPC until 12.30 and decide to have lunch at the nice ‘Event’ restaurant to learn, upon arrival around 2pm, that at 12 there had been a press presentation by the Torino 2006 Winter Games Team. We are disappointed to have missed it, but we …

We go to the Panathenaico together to see end of Women Marathon. The entry is a bit chaotic, with contradicting directions being given – entry by the stadium, where tickets are still distributed at the official boot, or through a special entrance at the National Gardens, linked to stadium through a walled corridor. At these entrance lots of people waiting, then we are told to move away, as we cannot get in without tickets. Most of us have them, so it is a useless remark that confuses people. It takes …

After a big breakfast with our hosts, we get to the ZPC and spend some time taking photographs at the Olympic Truce stand. We will use these for our university press release and to distribute information about the Truce more widely. We also go around the Panathenaiko stadium to take some photographs while it is empty. It is such a beautiful and memorable stadium. Later on today we will come here to see the end of the women’s marathon.
After lunch, we go to the Visa Olympians Meeting Centre to attend …

A full day at OAKA today for the athletics. We depart at around 730am, missing our bus and, thus, taking around 40mins to get to the tram. We arrive at OAKA around 915am and are, again, able to sit where we like. So we get some near front-row seats to watch the Heptahlon long jump. Denise Lewis pulls out with injury, though looked good in the performance. A strong performance from Team GB’s Kelly Sotherton. We also ‘see’ the 100m heats, which include Maurice Greene, Kim Collins and Greg Campbell, …

At 7pm we leave the ZPC for the Odeon of Herod Atticus. There we are going to see the opera ‘Rea’ by Spyros Samaras, which has been made famous because of its music becoming the basis for the modern Olympic Hymn. We are really exhausted and the hard stone seats do not help to make us feel relaxed, so we decide to leave at the end of act 1 and make a couple of tourists very happy with our tickets for the opera’s second half.
We go out for dinner at …

After the exhausting – but great – interviews session, Beatriz gets back to the Zappeion Press Centre to attend a press conference by the organisers of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006. During the press reception, we have a brief chat with Lord Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the London 2012 Bid. He is happy to hear about our project and very encouraging. We also see Prof Kristine Toohey from University of Technology in Sydney, with whom Beatriz had worked during her experience at the Sydney Organising Committee for Games …

At 3.45am, we walk over to Syntagma to catch the media coach down to Olympia. This was not provided free and was actually quite expensive. Their luxury coach was far from being luxury and we did feel sorry for some of the media, many of whom were big guys with big equipment. The 5hr journey down to Olympia cannot have been easy. Most of the journalists were from the Main Press Centre and it was full.
We arrive in Olympia at 9am and the route was quite different towards the end. …

Later that day, the Expo 2008 Thessaloniki bid committee gave a presentation about their aims. That night, we would prepare for one of the ZPC culture events, an evening of Greek cuisine. We had hoped for a table with ZPC officials and it more or less worked out, except for an unusual Frenchman who decided to sit with all of us and show us photographs of him with, among others, the Pope! This was a truly bizarre evening, with somewhat serious consequences. The meal was supposed to be the one …

Depart home around 9.15am, Beatriz was due to meet Nelly Kyriazi, Director of the Municipal Gallery of Athens. She is meeting her to talk about her role as curator of the ‘Athens by Art’ contemporary public art programme being presented throughout the city during the Olympic fortnight. Andy was at the ZPC until 1230pm, conducting the daily archival work.