Metal hoarding still dominates the south side of Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens, and the signs of construction work for the new metro line can still be seen throughout the city. But in recent weeks, work on the metro has contributed a lot less to traffic chaos in the Greek capital that the protests by students and teachers or the intermittent strikes by trolley and bus drivers.
Driving through Athens demands great patience at the best of times. But Greeks are more tolerant of the chaos created by construction work on the metro than they are of protests and strikes - at least the metro promises to bring some relief to the traffic jams and bottlenecks. And they point out that the new metro, the planned new airport and a new highway all helped to secure the 2004 Olympics for Greece.
The failure to secure the centenary games in 1996 was a blow to Greek national pride and honour. In the early 1990s, there was a feeling throughout the country that Greece had some proprietary hold over the games, and the Atlanta games allowed many to sneer at the over-commercialisation of the Olympics. Now Greeks are determined to ensure that when the games come to Athens in 2004, the world will recall their Greek origins and the fact that the original Olympics were about more than sport.
Greeks believe the Olympic Games ought to be more than a staged athletic event of limited duration every four years. The original games had a cultural dimension too: during the ancient games all wars ceased between the Greek city-states, and the four-year period between each Olympic Games was counted as an Olympiad.
Now the Greek Minister of Culture, Prof Evangelos Venizelos, has seized the opportunity provided by the Athens games in 2004 to promote the concept of the Cultural Olympiad. Throughout the four-year period between successive games, Dr Venizelos wants to see the Cultural Olympiad as a fixed event consisting of a series of important cultural occasions of international importance
He first presented the idea of the Cultural Olympiad to UNESCO in Paris last year, when it received unanimous acceptance. "Everyone understands that culture is an appropriate field for international co-operation," he says. "On this basis, new institutions need to be established", and he hopes his new enterprise will be established and working within the period 2000 to 2004.
The Cultural Olympiad will consist of a series of major cultural events of international interest, organised throughout the four-year period between successive games and in co-operation with the host cities.
But it is easy to assess participants in sporting Olympics - the fastest, the highest, the strongest, compete with each other. How could a Cultural Olympiad hope to standardise and numerically assess events and entrants? And the Greeks who have put forward the idea of a Cultural Olympiad are also aware that culture is not always an agent for the Olympian ideals of friendship, co-operation, understanding and co-existence: cultural differences have also caused political and military conflicts.
Mrs Sophia Hiniadou, the adviser to the Ministry of Culture with responsibility for the Cultural Olympiad, is aware of the danger of commercialisation, and at the same time wants to ensure the international dimension of the whole endeavour in a context of cultural pluralism and tolerance.
Four clear themes have emerged for the Cultural Olympiad: the culture of peace, co-existence and reconciliation; the culture of social cohesion and non-exclusion; the culture of the information society; and culture as a meeting place for tradition and innovation.
According to Mrs Hiniadou, the first Cultural Olympiad will open with the 2000 Sydney games and will end with 2004 Athens games. The plans for the opening include the "electronic kindling" of the Olympic Torch of Culture on the Internet, with a message of peace and social cohesion and of the Internet as a network of solidarity through knowledge and communication.
In Greece, the organisers plan to take advantage of the existing infrastructure provided by the country's cultural heritage, including ancient theatres, castles and large archaeological sites. The opening events will include an international conference on the state of culture at the dawn of third millennium, and will be staged in major symbolic venues such as the Lyceum of Aristotle and the Academy of Plato in Athens, Ancient Olympia, Delphi, Epidavros, Vergina, and Ancient Mieza.
The celebrations for 2000 coincide with the celebration of the sixth Greek Millennium, which is being marked with a multiple exhibition - "Axion Esti, the Millennia of Hellenism" - opening simultaneously in Athens, Rome, Egypt, China, New York, Japan, Sydney and Moscow. Later, events between 2001 and 2003 will include the simultaneous staging of anti-war works from the classic repertoire - tragedies such as The Trojan Women and The Suppliant Women, and comedies such as Aristophanes' Lysistrata - in all the major Greek and Roman theatres throughout the Mediterranean basin.
To ensure that the Cultural Olympiad is not a once-only event to coincide with the Athens games, the Greek government has helped to establish the International Foundation for the Cultural Olympiad. The foundation has its secretariat in ancient Olympia and in Athens, and the international governing committee includes the director-general of UNESCO, Mr Federico Mayor, the president of the International Olympic Committee, and the Greek Minister of Culture.
Although the foundation recognises that the Cultural Olympiads will need a competitive element to ensure their success, Mrs Hiniadou is aware of the danger of their degenerating into some form of "beauty contest" similar to the Eurovision Song Contest, or of their being commercialised in the same way as the Atlanta games. However, she is also keen to dismiss any idea that this is an effort from Athens to reclaim the Olympics as Greek cultural property. She points out that Greece first gave the world the concept of the Olympics. "It's our duty to save what we gave in the beginning. Athens 2004 is a good opportunity to start anew," she says.