Nemea ancient stadium
— the tunnel the runners came out of.
Not only on a wall.
Nemea ancient stadium, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A long grass-and-earth track in a quiet valley, with a stone-vaulted tunnel at one end where the athletes walked out. Nemea was one of the four Panhellenic games of ancient Greece. The stadium sat unused for centuries; the tunnel was lost under hillside and dug back out in the 1970s. On revival-games years, barefoot runners come through it again. The cicadas don't stop. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Ancient Nemea lies in a quiet upland valley of the Peloponnese, in the modern regional unit of Corinthia, roughly thirty kilometres southwest of Corinth. The stadium sits a short walk from the sanctuary of Zeus and its surviving three Doric columns. From the 6th century BC onward, Nemea hosted one of the four Panhellenic games, alongside Olympia, Delphi, and Isthmia. The site fell out of use in late antiquity. The University of California, Berkeley began systematic excavation here in 1973 under Stephen G. Miller.
The most distinctive feature of the stadium is its vaulted entrance tunnel, roughly thirty-six metres long, cut through the slope at the western end of the track. It is one of the oldest known true arches in Greek architecture, dated to around 320 BC. Athletes walked through it from the locker room (the apodyterion) onto the track. Graffiti scratched by competitors over two thousand years ago still survives on the tunnel walls. The track itself runs about a hundred and seventy-eight metres, the canonical Greek stadion.
The archaeological site and museum at Nemea are run by the Greek Ministry of Culture and are open most of the year, with reduced winter hours. The stadium and the sanctuary share a single admission. The Society for the Revival of the Nemean Games holds open footraces here every four years, in which anyone may run barefoot in a white tunic on the ancient track. The next revival is scheduled for the summer of 2028. The surrounding valley is a working wine country, planted heavily with Agiorgitiko vines.
