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From the efforts of revival to the permanent organization of the Games
It
seems that the idea for the revival of the Olympic Games was
formulated for the first time in the summer of 1833 in a poem
by Alexandros Soutsos.  It
was a poem that denounced the profound political crisis that
had marked the formation of the Greek State, which at that
time made its first steps as an independent state. The continuation
of confrontations among the leading groups of the Greek society,
namely the figures that had spearheaded the political and
war incidents of the fight for the Greek independence (1821-1833),
in which Soutsos had participated as well, was presented in
the poem as disastrous for the Greek society. In the light
of the above, the revival of the Olympics in Soutsos' poem
was associated with the request for the spiritual and cultural
"rebirth" of the Greek nation. Specifically, it was associated
with one of the principal ideological guidelines that had
inspired the Greek War of Independence, sanctioned the claim
for political independence and formed the ideological framework
of the Greek nation-state.
Four years later (1837), Panagiotis Soutsos, the brother of Alexandros, in the capacity of counsellor of Ioannis Kolettis, Minister of the Interior, forwarded a proposal bearing on the organization of the Olympic Games that would be held on the anniversary of the Greek War of Independence (25 March). Those games would include various sports and cultural activities. However, they were never realized. Apparently, that was also the case with the Olympic Games that had been announced the same year by the Municipality of Letrini.
The decisive step for the materialization of the idea for the revival of the ancient games was made by Evangelos Zappas, a former combatant in the war of independence, who was now a wealthy merchant living in Bucharest. In the late 1850s he offered the money for the organization of the Games, which were given the name Olympia and were held four times. Although the Olympia could hardly be described as sports games, with the exception perhaps of the organization of 1888, they kept the issue of the Olympic Games alive at a time when Greek sport was out of the question. The first processes for the formation of Greek sport in the late 1880s and early 1890s had coincided with the activity of Pierre de Coubertin for the creation of the Olympic Movement and reintroduced in the Greek society the issue of the Olympic Games under entirely different circumstances.
The request for the spiritual and cultural rebirth of the Greek nation, which had not ceased to exist throughout the 19th century, found expression in the 1896 Olympics. The organization of the first modern Olympic Games mobilized the whole of the Greek society, both as regards the organizational and the purely athletic aspect of the Games, and constituted the milestone in the development of Greek sport through more systematic and organized efforts.
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