Corinthia — Corinth and the Isthmus
The Corinth Canal separates the Peloponnese from the rest of Greece, and everyone has passed this way: ancient merchants, apostles, crusaders, Venetians, Ottomans. In the ancient city below, the Bema preserves the memory of the trial brought against the apostle Paul before the proconsul Gallio in the year 51; the Byzantines later turned it into a church. The temple of Apollo and the Lechaion Road complete the site, while the monastery of Saint Patapios, carved into the mountain above Loutraki, watches over the isthmus. The gateway to the Greek south opens here.
Argolis — Nafplio and Its Fortresses
The first capital of modern Greece, Nafplio was Frankish, Venetian and Ottoman before it was Greek, and it carries all four inheritances without disowning any. The Palamidi fortress crowns its rooftops; the fortified islet of Bourtzi floats in its bay; Italianate lanes climb towards Orthodox churches. Around it, Argolis holds Mycenae with its Lion Gate, and the theatre of Epidaurus, the best preserved in Greece. A region where the Greece of Homer and the Greece of Venice answer one another only a few kilometres apart.
Achaea — Kalavryta and Patras
After the fall of Constantinople, it was the monasteries that held firm. Closer to the peasantry than the higher clergy, they became, through nearly three centuries of occupation, the guardians of an identity nothing else protected. It was at Agia Lavra that the banner of the Greek Revolution was raised in 1821; close by, Mega Spilaio, one of the oldest monasteries in the Orthodox world, is built inside a cave. On the coast, the cathedral of Saint Andrew in Patras, the largest church in Greece, holds the apostle’s skull and a fragment of his cross.
Laconia — Mystras and Monemvasia
On a steep slope of Mount Taygetos stands Mystras, the best-preserved Byzantine city in Greece. Founded in 1249 by the Frankish lord William II of Villehardouin, taken by the Byzantines in 1262, it became in the fourteenth century the seat of the Despotate of Morea, where the Empire drew its last breath. What remains is the castle, the monasteries of Pantanassa and Peribleptos, the street plan and houses now in ruins. Further south, Monemvasia, the rock-city known as the Gibraltar of the East, carries this intact medieval Greece a stage further.
Mani and Messenia — Land’s End
Here Greece hardens. In the Mani, whole villages are built of stone towers, raised by families locked in feud for generations, while hundreds of small Byzantine chapels are scattered across a treeless countryside. The sea caves of Diros are explored by boat. Further west, in Messenia, the monastery of Panaghia Voulkano overlooks the plain of Kalamata, while the Venetian fortresses of Methoni and Koroni, among the best preserved in the Mediterranean, still guard the shore. You come here to understand what it means, for a people, to hold on.
