Monemvasia

Monemvasia is a town hidden on a rock. From the mainland of the southeastern Peloponnese it looks like a huge bare island, a slab of stone about a kilometre long, up to 300 metres wide and rising to a plateau some 100 metres above the sea. Only when you walk across the causeway and round its southern side does the town appear, packed into the lee of the cliff, invisible from the land. The name says the same thing in Greek: a place with a single entrance.

The town was founded in the 6th century by people who moved here from Sparta and the plain of Laconia, and it grew into one of the great trading ports of the Byzantine world, rich above all in the 11th and 12th centuries; the age up to 1460 is remembered as its golden one. It passed to Venice in 1463, to the Ottomans in 1540, back to Venice in 1690 and to the Ottomans again in 1715 until the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Its Italian name, Malvasia, travelled across Europe with the sweet wine shipped from its harbour and survives in the name of the grape.

The lower town is a maze of stone lanes, vaulted passages and tiled roofs inside walls on three sides, with the cathedral of Christos Elkomenos on its little square. A path climbs the cliff to the upper town, long abandoned and now a field of ruins, crowned by the 12th-century church of Hagia Sophia, a cross-in-square Byzantine church standing high above the sea. By 1971 only 32 people lived in the old town; restoration since then has brought it back to life without changing its shape. The poet Yannis Ritsos was born here in 1909.

Getting there

Monemvasia is about 70 km from Sparta. The nearest airport is Kalamata (KLX), about 101 km away. The rock is joined to the mainland village of Gefyra by a causeway about 400 metres long, and the lower town is entered on foot through its fortified gate.