The Rio–Antirrio Bridge (), officially the Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge, is one of the world's longest multi-span cable-stayed bridges and longest of the fully suspended type. It crosses the Gulf of Corinth near Patras, linking the town of Rio on the Peloponnese peninsula to Antirrio on mainland Greece by road. It opened one day before the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, on 12 August 2004, and was used to transport the Olympic flame. Location The bridge dramatically improves access to and from the Peloponnese, which could previously be reached only by ferry or via the isthmus of Corinth in the east. Its width is —it has two vehicle lanes per direction, an emergency lane and a pedestrian walkway. Its five-span four-pylon cable-stayed portion of length is the world's third longest cable-stayed deck; only the decks of the Jiaxing-Shaoxing Sea Bridge in Shaoxing, China and the Millau Viaduct in southern France are longer at and , respectively. However, as the former has a shorter length of main span (the length of the main span is the most common way to rank cable-stayed bridges, as the size of the main span does often correlate with the height of the towers, and the engineering complexity involved in designing and constructing the bridge) and as the latter is also supported by bearings at the pylons apart from cable stays, the Rio–Antirrio Bridge deck might be considered the longest cable-stayed "suspended" deck in the world. This bridge is widely considered to be an engineering masterpiece, owing to several solutions applied to span the difficult site. These difficulties include deep water, insecure materials for foundations, seismic activity, the probability of tsunamis, and the expansion of the Gulf of Corinth due to plate tectonics. Construction Charilaos Trikoupis was a 19th-century prime minister of Greece who suggested building a bridge in the current location but Greece's finances at the time didn't permit its construction. The bridge was planned in the mid-1990s and was built by a French-Greek consortium led by the French group Vinci SA which includes the Greek companies Hellenic Technodomiki-TEV, J&P-Avax, Athena, Proodeftiki and Pantechniki. The consortium operates the bridge under concession under its ΓΕΦΥΡΑ or ΓαλλοΕλληνικός Φορέας Υπερθαλάσσιας ζεύξης Ρίου-Αντιρίου (GEFYRA—Greek for "bridge"—or GalloEllinikós Foréas Yperthalássias zéfxis Ríou-Antiríou, French-Greek Carrier of Oversea Connection of Rio–Antirrio) subsidiary. The suspension of the blue decorative lighting was announced by the company due to the ongoing electricity crisis in Europe but