Qualla: Corinth Canal

Corinth Canal: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ploync, CC BY 3.0. In 67 AD, the Emperor Nero broke ground on the Corinth Canal with a golden pickaxe, ceremonially removed the first basket of soil, and put 6,000 workers to work cutting trenches from both ends of the isthmus. The workforce consisted of prisoners captured during the First Jewish-Roman War — men who had been transported from their homeland to dig a trench through a Greek hillside at the order of a Roman emperor. Nero died the following year. The project stopped. The trench sat open for 1,800 years. When the engineers who built the modern canal arrived in 1881, they discovered Nero's trenches still there and reused the same exploratory shafts to probe the rock. The modern canal follows the same course Nero had planned. It opened in 1893. The canal that everyone wanted, that kept killing its advocates before they could finish it, was finally dug — and immediately started falling apart.

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Image: Ploync | CC BY 3.0

Corinth Canal: Two Thousand Years of Trying

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bela Gerster (1850–1923), Public domain. The idea of cutting through the Isthmus of Corinth is old enough to be attributed to Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, in the 7th century BC. He looked at the project and decided it was too expensive, too ambitious, and too risky — fearing the canal would undercut Corinth's role ...

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Image: Bela Gerster (1850–1923) | Public domain

Corinth Canal: Six Thousand Judean Prisoners and a Pickaxe

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean Housen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The labour force Nero assembled for the canal project deserves to be remembered by name, though history has not preserved those names. The 6,000 Judean prisoners of war who dug the trenches in 67 AD were captives from the First Jewish-Roman War — people whose homes had been destr...

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Image: Jean Housen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Corinth Canal: Built at Last, and Immediately Troubled

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Myview.pc, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern canal's construction history is its own saga of ambition, bankruptcy, and engineering difficulty. After Greek independence in 1830, the statesman Ioannis Kapodistrias tried to revive the project but abandoned it when the estimated cost — 40 million gold francs — proved...

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Image: Myview.pc | CC BY-SA 4.0

Corinth Canal: A Scar Through the Isthmus

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original: Aspiasia Coumiotis Derivative work: Spilla at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. The canal as it exists today is a single lock-free channel 6,343 metres long, 24.6 metres wide at the surface and 21.3 metres at the bottom, with limestone walls rising 90 metres above sea level at a near-vertical 80-degree angle. No other waterway in the world looks quite like i...

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Image: Original: Aspiasia Coumiotis Derivative work: Spilla at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5