WATER FOTR ATHENS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 38, 14 February 1930, Page 16

WATER FOTR ATHENS

MARATHON DAM

Hitherto Athens has suffered more from lack of water than any European capital. Drinking water has been purchased from pedlars, who brought it by.the- demijohn from the island of Aegina or from some spring on the marble mountains of Pentelicus or Hymettus. Bath water has equally been a luxury. Now the water supply of Athens will be reconstructed at a cost of £2,500,000 by. building a marble dam around the Marathon, Lake in the hills above Athens and using a stretch of aqueduct built by the Emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius in the second century, A.D., . writes the London correspondent of the Melbourne "Argus." The successful effort has been made by the Ulen Company of America, * a country which was known only as the "Lost Atlantis" to the Greeks of Hellenic or Roman Athens. Hadrian's aqueduct brought water from near Cephissia, and ended in a cistern on the south-west' extremity of Lycabettus. For many centuries the aqueduct had an antiquarian interest. The columns and an architrave on the cistern-house existed in the 19th century, together with an inscription attributing the work to Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. About sixty years ago, however, part of the Roman aqueduct was incorporated in the water-supply system of Athens, a, work which the engineers of the Ulen Company are now carrying to completion. The capacity of the new reservoir is upwards of 9,000,000 gallons a day. The Marathon Lake, whence much of the water is drawn, is about five miles from the famous'battlefield, the name of which it bears. As the reservoir lies in the heart of the marble hills overlooking Athens, the American engineers have constructed their dam from the local stone. It is 150 ft thick at the base, and it rises about 175 ft above the river bed, so it is an object of imposing beauty, glittering in the clear sunshine of Attica. From the Marathon Lake the water is conveyed in a tunnel Bft. in diameter and eight miles and a half in length through the mountain. In the course of cutting the tunnel much subterranean water has been tapped and diverted into the general supply, so that the nearer section of the uncompleted tunnel is already delivering 4,500.000 gallons of water daily to Athens. "The Times" mentions that the tunnel, dam, and aqueduct will be completed in a .few months. Three thousand men are engaged upon the work, which has been in progress since April, 1925. The. enterprise brings into a whole the water-supply ;System of Pisistratus, dating from five centuries before Christ, Hadrian's aqueduct of A.D. 130, and the work of the Ulen Company of to-day.