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The dawn of Greek sport
The dawn of Greek sport goes back to the last quarter of the 19th century, when began the foundation of the first Greek sports associations, both  inside and outside the Greek State. This development was intensified in the late 1880s and early 1890s with the organization of the first sports games. The milestone in that process was the entrustment of the first modern Olympic Games to Greece, which had accelerated the formation of the Greek sports institutions and gave shape to Greek sport.
The development of Greek sport corresponded to the wider development and diffusion of sport centred in Europe and North America, especially in the second half of the 19th century. As a practice, sport was adopted, in Greece as well, by the middle and upper social strata and constituted a leisure activity. More precisely, the spread of sport was an aspect of the modernization of the Greek society and mainly of its harmonization with the economic, social and cultural developments brought about in the "advanced West". In the light of the above, the development of Greek sport was an indirect result of the modernization processes of the Greek society, which had been inaugurated with the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and were put under way with the foundation of the independent Greek State as a modern nation-state in the early 1830s.
From that time and up to the last quarter of the 19th century involvement in sport was practically nonexistent, with the exception of the Olympia. That was an institution, which could hardly be described as athletic and whose gradual evolution throughout the altogether four organizations that had been held (within a period of almost three decades) reflected the transition from a "traditional" culture of display of physical vigour to the modern sports activity. The organization of the Olympia had been associated with the request for the revival of the Olympic Games and, what is more, at the same time that this request appeared in the sports circles that had been created in Europe.
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