With great pride, Greeks carry the torch of Olympic spirit

CORINTH, Greece -- Maria Kouki muscled her way through hundreds of revelers in Greek-flag shirts to reach the Olympic flame, which a relay of local heroes had jogged into town on the last week of the torch's journey to Athens.

"Chaos!" she announced to no one in particular as she clutched her 3-year-old daughter, Sofia Kouki-Tsoulta, and ducked under a row of outstretched arms zapping photos of the flame via cellphone.

But Kouki was smiling in the hot night. Fireworks glittered in the sky while the Greek rock band Pyx Lax played Pink Floydish music on a smoky, lighted stage near the beach. Street vendors sold grilled meat kebabs and wilted cotton candy to children wearing lighted pins of Greece that pulsed blue, the national color.

"Can you imagine what it's going to be like in Athens when the flame gets there?" said Kouki, her voice rising as Pyx Lax rocked. "That's going to be something else! But I can't go there, so this party is going to be the Olympic celebration for me."

The torch relay arrives in Athens tomorrow. For the last two months, it has stopped with great fanfare in every prefecture in Greece. Corporate sponsorship and breathless television reporting notwithstanding, the relay has become a national experiment in grass-roots bonding before opening ceremonies commence in the capital city on Friday.

Torchbearers have included college students, amateur and pro athletes, farmers, and postal workers alongside local celebrities such as singer Yiannis Parios.

"It was very important for me to do this," says Pantelis Noulas, 25, a volleyball player from Corinth who ran with the torch in his hometown. "It made me feel very connected to the Olympics in a way I don't know I would have reached alone."

"We are proud to be Greek," said his sister, Angeliki, 24, a gymnast who also ran with the torch.

The flame began its journey March 25 in ancient Olympia, where the Games began in 776 BC. For the next three months, it traveled 46,800 miles through 26 countries and included torchbearers such as actresses Nia Vardalos and Jennifer Aniston, former South African president Nelson Mandela, and Olympic gold medalists Nadia Comaneci, a gymnast, and Cathy Freeman, a sprinter. On July 9, the torch's journey began its second leg -- in Greece. It opened in Crete, Greece's largest island, before torchbearers carried it -- by helicopter, car, and foot -- through the volcanic splendor of the Cyclades, the lush northern mainland, the balding mountains of the southern peninsula, and the Aegean coastal towns.

Celebration awaited at each stop, even though the Games have invoked mixed feelings in many Greeks who wish their Olympics had not become a slave to big business and the specter of terrorism.

Greeks such as Athenian Reggina Lazopoulou, 32, viewed the flame as a symbol of something pure and precious -- like the Olympic Truce, the ancient tradition of suspending armed conflicts in honor of the Games.

"You want to feel like you are participating in something meaningful," says Lazopoulou, a volleyball player who ran with the torch in Corinth. "You must search for that meaning, but when you find it you must protect it."

In Corinth, the ancient home of the perpetually stone-rolling king Sisyphus, the flame rested overnight on Monday before leaving for the town of Marathon and then Athens. Police protected the entrance to the square containing the flame while TV journalists interviewed swimmer Nikos Xylouris, who had run with the flame and whose suntanned good looks had caused swoons among the women in the crowd.

The police let the crowd into the square after the officialdom -- the interviews, the speeches, the opening songs by Pyx Lax -- had finished. Within minutes, the rush to the flame began.

Maria Kouki finally reached the flame around midnight, just as Pyx Lax was wrapping up a song in English. The crowd had thinned, little Sofia was tired, and Kouki had lost her husband somewherein the crowd. She said hello to an old man, who announced that many of the restaurants along the square had been so busy that night that they had run out of grilled pork souvlaki and Mythos, a Greek beer.

Then she found a spot near the flame, next to two grade-schoolers mugging for the cameras with stuffed replicas of Phoivos and Athena, the Athens 2004 Olympic mascots.

"See this fire, Sofia?" she told her daughter with exhausted satisfaction. "This is for us."