Brilliant, creative, dazzling and mesmerizing.

The Olympic Games 2004 started with an electrifying and spellbinding opening ceremony at the Olympic Stadium here on Friday evening.
The ceremony, no doubt, was brilliant, dazzling and mesmerizing.

The three-and a-half hour event was more creative than the ceremony held in Sydney, Australia, four years ago as it kept the audiences throughout on the edge.

The water and fire were used keeping in view the Greek history.

For the Greeks, the sea is everything, a means of travel and trade and a source of food and joy.
It represents both the source and the possibility of life.
To the Greek philosopher Thalis, water was the first element of the world.

Fire symbolized the divinity of the soul and the spirit.
In ancient times it symbolized knowledge and the power.

The ceremony started at 8.45pm and 400 drummers made the sound of a human heart-beat across the stadium and a giant video screen counted down from 40 seconds.

As it hit zero there was an explosion of white light and a huge comet struck the lake, created with millions of gallons of water, to form the five Olympic rings in flames

After a small boy, waving a small Greek flag, had sailed the lake in a paper boat, he was greeted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge and head of the Athens organising committee Gianna Angelopoulos.

Then a centaur (half-man, half horse) throws a javelin into the centre of the lake

A 50ft Greek sculpture emerged from the lake and exploded

Then there was a parade of floats carrying hundreds of Greek mythological figures.
The parade featured more than 400 ancient figures, dancers and puppeteers.

The final figure, a pregnant woman, stepped into the water to spark off a cascade of tiny lights throughout the stadium followed by parade of athletes from 202 countries.

The contingents gathered at the centre of the vanished lake from which an olive tree was shown growing

Greek president Constantine Stephanopoulos declared the Games open while the Greek flag was raised and the country’s national anthem was played.

The procession of teams, in Greek alphabetical order, ended with a map of the world being unfolded over the heads of the assembled athletes.

Figures representing the 36 countries through which the Olympic flame had passed flew through the air carrying illuminated batons.

Then an evening of gradually rising cheer was brought to a climax when the flame, looked like a huge cigar, was lit by Nikolaos Kakalamanakis, a gold-medal-winning windsurfer

Then with a blast of beautiful fireworks around the stadium roof the ceremony was concluded

Police helicopters, aeroplanes and a surveillance airship which loomed overhead throughout the day were a constant reminder to guard the biggest sporting event on the Planet Earth.

The extravaganza was a victory for Greek organisers, who managed to pull together despite serious construction delays, worldwide skepticism and terrorist worries that made the Games most expensive in Olympic history and required help from NATO.

With the five Olympic rings ablaze in the middle of a manmade sea, the Summer Games returned to their birthplace Friday in an epic homecoming that joined the gods of ancient Greece and modern sport.

The biggest parade of nations in the games' history began with an announcer's cry of "Welcome back to Greece!" and culminated with a Greek windsurfing champion lighting the Olympic cauldron, which rose slowly at the end of a slender 102-foot arm to burn brightly above the stadium

It was a moment many doubted Greek organizers could pull off, after years of worrisome delays and constant pressure to bolster the most expensive security network ever at the games.

The opening ceremony also closed an important circle in sports, from the Olympics' innocent rebirth in 1896 to the latest gathering of the world's greatest athletes under 202 flags in an age beset by fears of terrorism and instability.

"Greece is standing before you. We are ready. ... We have waited long for this moment," said the games' chief organizer, Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, standing under a model of an olive tree in Olympic Stadium.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge urged athletes to "show us that sport unites by overriding national, political, religious and language barriers."
"We need peace, we need tolerance, we need brotherhood," he said.

At dusk, a countdown video filled the screen at the stadium - whose new weblike canopy was bolted into place only last month.
The numbers clicked down from 28 - one second for each of the games scheduled since the first modern Olympiad in an all-marble arena in central Athens.
Each tick of the clock was accompanied by the amplified sound of a human heartbeat.

Then, with a blast of fireworks ringing the stadium roof, the ceremony was fully under way.

Minutes later, the five Olympic rings, representing the five continents of the world, were ablaze

"We did it! We did it!" chanted a group of flag-waving Greeks in the stands.

A round-the-clock work blitz - under broiling sun and blinding spotlights - managed to pull together the vast network of venues, transport links, villages and security needed for the athletes and heads of state at the first Summer Games since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A sign of the security measures floated overhead - a blimp with supersensitive spyware.

Outside the stadium sat symbols of the delays - dirt expanses instead of landscaped paths, idle cranes and trees planted just last week.

Earlier, an IOC member who helped oversee the preparations noted how much was at stake if the Greeks failed.
"I think you have saved Greece and saved the IOC from great humiliation," Alex Gilady told Athens organizers.

The spectacle of the opening ceremony - tradition mixed with Las Vegas-style fanfare - celebrated Greek history, culture and civilization.

After the burning Olympic flames subsided, a boy on a replica of a ship sailed into the arena, waving a small Greek flag

Then a centaur (the mythological half-man, half-horse) waded into the water and tossed a spear of light representing a javelin

From the center of the stadium rose a statue representing an ancient form from Greece's Cyclades islands

The form broke apart to reveal other figures from Greek history

The ancient god of love, Eros, flew above two lovers dancing and playing in the water

Then Eros hovered over a procession of figures from Greek history - from ancient vase paintings to a tribute to the Greek shepherd, Spiros Louis, who won the first Olympic marathon.

"The great moment has come!" cried the announcer.

Moments later, the parade of nations began with the appearance of Greek weightlifter Pyrros Dimas, who is seeking his fourth consecutive gold medal at the games

Behind him more than 10,500 athletes streamed into the stadium

There was huge applause for Afghanistan on its return to Olympic competition after an eight-year absence and with its first female athletes.

The entrance of the more than 500-member U.S. team - led by basketball guard Dawn Staley - drew cheers.
But some people also stood and put their thumbs down in an apparent show of displeasure for the war in Iraq.

Moments later, the Iraqis entered to a roaring ovation.

The Chinese team was led by 7-foot-6 Yao Ming, who towered over even other basketball giants in the main stadium field.

And Paraguay carried a banner that read "From Horror to Hope" in apparent reference to the supermarket fire that killed nearly 400 people earlier this month.

For nearly two hours, the teams filed along a black walkway into the stadium - Russians in '20s-style white outfits, first-time Olympians from the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati in woven grass costumes, Tajik female athletes in gold headdresses, women from Moldova in hot pink pantsuits, and men from Burundi dancing with spears.

Greece, because of its links to the ancient games, entered first, as usual.
But, as the host nation, the more than 440 Greek athletes also were the last into the stadium - walking single file as the crowd chanted "Hellas, Hellas," as the country is called in Greek.

Pageant combines history with technology, earth with fire and water, presenting a modern eye on Greece through the ages.

Athens welcomed the Olympics back to the city in which they were revived in 1896 last night with an opening ceremony that combined homage to the Greeks and their long march through the millennia with an enthusiastic welcome to the athletes of all the world's nations competing in these Games.

The ceremony combined state of the art technology with simple and strong images from myth, history and civilization, ranging from stylized depictions of Bronze Age Cretans leaping over a bull to a pantomime of the Olympic revival in 1896.

The show, whose artistic director was dancer-choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou, was performed by nearly 5,000 volunteers and artists, and tied together a rich past with a modern sensibility, touching repeatedly on Greek history without resorting to cliche.

It provided the message of a modern country that Greek organizers hope the successful hosting of the Olympics will show.

The modernization that Athens has undergone in order to host the Games will also leave it a more modern and sophisticated city than it was before the Games.

These preparations have come at a cost that has still not been calculated fully.
But government officials estimate that in the end it will be about 7 billion euros.

A billion euros are being spent on an unprecedented security umbrella that ranges from 24-hour patrols by military planes to underwater sensors in ports.
These are the first Summer Games since the advent of mass terrorism on September 11, 2001.

But support for the Games has been overwhelming, with the Greeks proud to show the rest of the world what a small nation can accomplish.

On a hot and windless night, when even the flags on the top tiers of the stadium hung limp, the 72,000 people in the stadium and an estimated 4 billion television viewers were treated to a show that combined Greek history with the sea, earth and inventiveness that have forged the Greek character.

One of the central pieces of the show was a huge 17.3-meter-high replica of the head of a Cycladic statue rising out of the water that covered the stadium floor

As this prehistoric era statue rose above the stadium, it disintegrated slowly, revealing first the statue of a young man in the stiff style of the Archaic era (known as a kouros) before this too disintegrated to reveal the relaxed and realistic statue of a young man in the style we now know as Classical, which represents the Classical age of Athens in the fifth century BC and which is best expressed by the Acropolis and its temples.

This was the first time that the Olympic Stadium, which was originally built in 1982, was used with the magnificent new roof designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

The crowd was warm and enthusiastic, with big cheers going to the teams of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan.