Vatheia

Vatheia is the image most people carry away from the deep Mani: a knot of tall, square stone towers crowded onto a rocky hilltop near the southern tip of the Peloponnese, with the sea on one side and bare, stony mountains on the other. It stands on the road from Areopoli to Cape Tainaron, about a kilometre and a half inland from the Messenian Gulf, and from any approach the village looks less like a settlement than a small fortified city, every house its own keep.

The towers are the architecture of a feud. The Mani was a land of powerful clans, and in the villages of its southern end families built upwards, turning their homes into towers. Vatheia is first recorded by a Venetian mission in 1571, had around twenty households in 1618 and about two hundred inhabitants by 1700. When the English traveller William Martin Leake passed through in April 1805 on his way to Cape Matapan, his guides told him the village had been split into two warring factions for some forty years, a vendetta that had already cost around a hundred lives. From the late eighteenth century the village and its surrounding hamlets were controlled by eight clans, the four largest living in Vatheia itself. Most of the towers you see today date from between about 1840 and the early twentieth century, the last great age of tower building in the village.

In the twentieth century the village emptied. By 1979 only eleven people lived here permanently. Its architectural value was recognised in 1976, when it was listed as a protected settlement, and the Greek National Tourism Organisation included it in a programme to preserve traditional villages, led by the architect Aris Konstantinidis; a group of towers, olive mills and other buildings was restored and turned into small guesthouses. Around the main village, the hillsides are dotted with more abandoned houses, towers and chapels, and the area also holds megalithic remains.

The best way to see Vatheia is to walk its steep lanes between the towers and then look back at it from the road, where the whole cluster stands against the sky. In spring the surrounding hills are covered in wildflowers, and the landscape of small fields, maquis and scattered chapels running down to the sea is the Mani at its most austere and beautiful.

Getting there

Vatheia lies in the municipality of East Mani in Laconia, on the road between Areopoli and Cape Tainaron; nearby villages include Gerolimenas and Alika to the north-west and Lagia to the north-east. The nearest city is Sparta, about 69 km away as the crow flies. The nearest airport is Kalamata Airport (KLX), about 79 km away in a straight line; the village is reached by car along the Mani road via Areopoli.