Our trip in the Mani: fire, pomegranates, octopus - and a picture of me in a bikini

We started our Mani trip in Kardamyli, which was (according to the Iliad) one of the seven cities offered by Agamemnon to Achilles (the best warrior the Greeks had at the time), to stop him sulking in his tent over some slave girl. Bloody Gen-whatever they had then. It’s a pretty little town, with good places to swim, and fine walks in the mountains behind the town. The guidebook warned of hiking hoards (there is even a walking shop in the town - shock horror), but we never met anyone else on our perambulations.

Geoff swimming at Kardamyli, and below picking pomegranates for breakfast

The mother of the owner of the place we stayed gave us pomegranates from her tree and walnuts that were drying (in their shells) on the back step. It was a fine addition to breakfast - fresh figs, cereal, yogurt and honey being food of choice at the time.

Note: Photos on this page a mixture of mine and Geoff's. Assume the best ones are his and the ones with him in are mine! The picture at the top is of Stravropigi.

From Kardamyli we headed south to Areopoli, which has a fine, if touristy, old part of town and the last bank before the Deep Mani. We heard banks can't keep their systems running because the electricity isn’t reliable enough - though we didn’t have problems with power cuts. Just south of Areopoli are the most extraordinary caves I’ve ever seen - and New Zealand is no slouch when it comes to fine caves. More on them in another blog.

Eating ice creams in Areopoli

We’d intended to go from Areopoli down the west coast of the peninsula and then back up the east. But we discovered when we tried to drag Sam out on a walk that he’d selfishly grown out of his shoes. (Good anti-walking plan, Sam!) We enquired and were reliably informed that Gythio, at the top of the Mani on the east side, was THE place for shoe shopping. For such trivial things are great travel plans changed.

So we went to Gythio and bought shoes. And (I admit it) I splashed out on a bikini at a wonderful old-fashioned lingerie shop run by a large, enthusiastic and unembarrassed seller of bras and bikinis. It’s the first bikini I’ve owned since I was a teenager, New Zealand being more into covering up than exposing one’s wobbly middle regions. Oh the excitement of a (possibly) brown stomach.

At Alypa, with my fine new bikini and my stomach in all its sad flabby whiteness...

Moving right along.

Gythio, as I’ve mentioned before, is where Helen and Troy did the dastardly deed that sparked the Trojan war. It’s a pretty place with - in our experience - surprisingly disappointing seafood. Looked better than it tasted.

And then on south. This part of the Mani, already pretty barren, was further ravaged by a big bush fire in July, which killed hundreds of animals, destroyed thousands of olive groves and caused the evacuation of the village of Kotronas - the inhabitants being taken out by sea, as the coast road was closed. Amazingly no one was hurt and only five houses were destroyed - the tough Mani stone doing a good protection job. If it can withstand centuries of inter-family warfare, what’s a bit of wild fire...

Still, with grey skies, the dramatic tower houses and the burned-out, rock-ridden landscape, it was impressively bleak.

Kotronas after the fire, and below, burnt out olive groves

We spent a long time wandering around Flomochori, which doesn't even rate a mention in either of our guide books, but is rather gorgeous, with a fine crop of tower houses. Check here for a selection of photos - it's not hard to imagine feuding families shooting at each other from the tower windows, and could those stains down the walls be from the boiling oil... ?

After Flomochori we few nights at Alypa Cove - mostly because we could. (It’s so lovely it’s worthy of its own blog - to follow.) And then we went further south, basing ourselves for four nights in the surprisingly smart harbour of Gerolimenas. Actually, the town, which sits under a huge cliff, is on its second heyday. In the 1870s it was a booming commercial port, exporting 7000 of the then local delicacy - quails - to France each month. It’s not hard to imagine why that trade dried up (bye-bye little quails).

The waterfront at Gerolimenas, and (below) Geoff admiring said waterfront. It's frustrating how you can't even order a cup of coffee in a tourist cafe without getting a bottle of water - which has only a vague chance of being recycled.

We stayed up the hill above the town and at night heard strange howling noises - not quite dogs, nor cats, nor crying infants. We asked and found out it was a pack of golden jackals, endangered animals that look like a small wolf. Kinda cool.

Gerolimenas has luxuries like reasonable Wi-Fi (tho not in our room), so during the day Sam sat in the restaurant of the local hotel doing his schoolwork (and maybe some other computer-related stuff?!), and Geoff and I ventured down to the very tip of the country - partly by car, partly on foot, passing through Vathia, one of the more dramatic of the Mesa Mani villages, with its tower houses standing out grimly on the ridge.

Loyal readers may realise I've used this pic before - but I really like it. What a great place and one of Geoff's favourite photos

Cape Tainaron, the southern-most point of Greece, was a thriving hub in Roman times - one of a collection of 20 cities which got together to fight the Spartans. They had their own coinage, dialect and worship. Now there’s a whole lot of not much down there, except an unexpected (and totally unprotected) fragment of a Roman mosaic, a fine lighthouse and a car park full of tourists (like us) wanting to visit nearly the end of Europe. Actually, Tarifa in Spain has that honour, but at least Cape Tairnaron is further south than Tunis and Algiers. Pah to them.

Us and (below) the lighthouse at the end of the world

F*** off, we're from the Mani

The first people to live in the Mani were refugee Spartans, who preferred to flee to the windswept and inhospitable mountains, rather than live under foreign rule. Given that heritage (maybe read my Spartan blog (below) if you haven't done so) you'll not be surprised that the Maniots have a long-standing and apparently well-deserved reputation for ferocity and war-like behaviour. History doesn’t suggest they threw weak babies into ravines, but so fierce and combative were the inhabitants of this barren region that the various foreign powers that invaded the rest of Greece only vaguely managed to bring Maniots under control. 
They were also excellent, ruthless pirates. And the women were super-tough too. In 1826, during the war of independence, 300 Mani women beat back invading Turkish soldiers with their sickles. (Their menfolk weren't available because they were off fighting the Turks elsewhere.) There's a monument in the car park at Dirou Caves.

When they weren’t fighting off foreign invaders, or robbing hapless visitors from passing ships, the people of the Mani - particularly those in the remote “Deep Mani” in the south - passed the time on vast, vicious, inter-clan feuds, some of which lasted for generations and decimated families. Think the Capulets and the Montagues in Romeo and Juliet displaced to a rocky peninsula in the middle of nowhere.

The feuds might start over personal stuff (“Don’t you look at my sister like that”), but basically it was all about land. The Mani is so rocky and inhospitable that any tiny patch that could be cleared of stones and terraced to grow wheat or vegetables was worth defending (if you owned it) or trying to steal off your neighbour, if you didn’t. Hence the Mani families or clans didn’t live in normal homes, but built mini-stone castles, called tower houses.

This one hasn't been renovated...

The defensive towers, which stood next to the building where the family lived, didn’t have a staircase, instead there was an internal ladder that could could be pulled up from inside. Turrets at the top and small windows meant you could shoot at your assailants (arrows first, then later rifles and cannons), and there were also “zematistres” or stone platforms for pouring boiling oil or water.
In the Exo Mani (the slightly more fertile northern part), villages tended to have only one clan - and therefore only one tower house. But in the Mesa (Deep) south, villages often had several warring families, so that there might be quite a few tower houses, with castle-to-castle battles taking place at close range. The aim was to destroy your rival’s tower, kill members of his family and take control of his land. So cute.

Apparently one clan feud in this village, Vathia, lasted 40 years and cost 100 lives.

Even decades after the Mani (reluctantly) became part of an independent Greece in the 1820s, the Maniots carried on fighting each other. The last family feud ended in 1870 and was only stopped when 400 members of the Greek national army moved in.
We spent a wonderful couple of weeks exploring Mani villages on foot and in the car. They are very splendid, perched on top of the rugged mountains, though when you come to take a photo, the tower houses somehow blend into the rocks around.

Look at the effort that went into those terraces - in their day they would have grown wheat and vegetables on these tiny strips. No wonder they fought to protect their land.

The Maniots are embracing tourism, and making a living out of visitors in a new way, but somehow I wonder whether that old animosity towards each other isn’t entirely gone. Old habits die hard.
Many of the tower houses have been gentrified and made into hotels or holiday homes, and no one grows wheat and veges on the bare soil of the disintegrating terraces (though there are still lots of olive trees). Gone are the cannons and the boiling oil to defend your house, but that doesn’t mean Maniots are inviting their neighbours in for tea. In place of guns are huge fences and gates, barbed wire, padlocks, large loud dogs, and “don’t even think about coming in here” signs. (Click across for some examples) Old habits die hard.

We saw one farm with eight large, nasty-looking dogs, and several places with huge gates guarding a ramshackle shed, or an abandoned field. You can’t be too careful with that bloody Dimitri at number 22.

Thanks to Geoff  for most of the photos on this page

The Mani: Lots of rocks and EU money

There's a story about the Mani - the middle Greek Peloponnese finger. God, having finished creating the world, had a whole lot of rocks left over. He grinned and chucked them on the Mani. And there they still are.

Deserts aside, the Mani must be one of the more inhospitable places in the world. Particularly the "Deep Mani", the even-more-barren, mountainous southern part, where to get anything to grow requires extraordinary terracing - and moving a lot of rocks.

(Couldn't resist the Zen rocks!)

Inhospitable, non?

The Maniots, as they are called, endlessly fought over sparce water resources and any patch of even vaguely fertile land. They built strong stone houses, with castle-like towers, in villages often perched (for defensive purposes) on fairly inaccessible hillsides.

The village of Flomochori, in the deep Mani. See what I mean about inhospitable countryside.

But life was hard and the population of the Mani declined - from around 30,000 in the early 1800s, to probably less than 5000 these days, with thousands moving to the cities and emigrating. Many Mani villages became practically deserted. Until recently, the tower houses crumbled and the mule tracks leading between the settlements fell into disrepair.

Not any more. The smallest Mani settlement on some godforsaken rocky mountaintop, now has several beautifully restored properties and a nice paved road. How come, we wondered?

Kotronas tarted up for the tourists

The answer came one day when I was hitching through the Deep Mani to pick up our hire car from where we'd left it at the beginning of a walk. I got a ride with a Greek guy living in Athens, who was going back to his family's village for his father’s funeral. He asked me what had changed in the 30 or so years since I’d last been in Greece. I ventured that even tiny rural roads were now paved and so many old houses had been renovated. 

He smiled. “EU money."

Of course. I looked it up and there has been an extraordinary amount of European Union (and before that European Community) money pumped into Greece in the last three and a half decades. In fact, since Greece joined the EC in 1981, it has received €113 billion more from European coffers than it has paid into those same coffers. €113 billion. In 2015 alone, Greece received €433 more per head of population than it contributed. Sorry about the italics, but that's a lot of dosh.

How much has gone towards tarmacking rural roads in the Mani and making crumbling stone tower houses look like new (or possibly better) isn’t clear. But I would hazard it’s quite a lot. The place is looking fabulous. 

Not long ago Vathia got a lot of money to restore its tower houses and turn them into hotels. The restoration happened, but not the hotels. Now the village is largely abandoned, though apparently there's a cafe there in the summer. It's the most glorious place.

Ironically (particularly for the non-Greek Europeans pumping money into the Mani), a large proportion of renovated Mani tower houses aren't even lived in. We visited out of peak season and most were firmly shuttered. Holiday homes, often for expat Greeks or foreigners. The Germans, for example, have bought big in Greece - property is cheap and the weather is better than at home.

Still, given the level of German funding for the EU, there's a certain symmetry in that.

Renovated house at Lagkada

Magical Mystras tour

A Classical mausoleum for a rich family at Ancient Messene.   (The photos in this blog are a mix of mine and Geoff's. His are the best ones.)

I’ll let you into a secret: I’m not that keen on Ancient Greek architecture. It’s amazing because it’s so old, and impressive because it’s so grand (and I do have a soft spot for classical aqueducts), but all those columns and temples and plinths and semi-naked warriors and gods on top of pillars don’t do much for me.
Byzantine, now that’s another thing entirely. I could happily have lived among those beautiful Byzantine churches, castles, lanes and palaces. Modern, in comparison to the “Ancient” stuff, the Byzantine empire first started moving into the Peloponnese in the 4th century AD and wasn’t entirely ousted from the region until the Turk/Ottoman occupation in 1460.

The Byzantine Church of Agia Sofia at Monemvasia. Just so gorgeous.

And the equally fabulous Agia Sofia church and monastery at Mystras. Saint Sofia, who died in AD 137, had three daughters, who she named Faith, Hope and Charity. Under the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, not a Christian in any sense of the word, guards took Sofia's daughters one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, and tortured them to death, to get Sofia to renounce her faith in Christ. She did not, instead burying her three girls, before dying herself.

Another admission: I find the term “Byzantine” confusing. Maybe because it is an artificial construct of historians. The “Byzantine” empire is actually more accurately the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its capital was actually Constantinople by then, not Byzantium.  So when people talk about the “Byzantine” empire, they are actually talking about part of the “Roman” empire, after the emperors got converted to Christianity. Nothing to do with Byzantium really. 
Part of the confusion is that ironically this Eastern Roman Empire (what is now Greece, Turkey etc) survived far longer than the original Rome-based empire did. The last emperor of Rome was executed by barbarians in AD476. 
Clear as mud.
Anyway, the Byzantine cities in the Peloponnese are simply lovely. We visited two - Monemvasia and Mystras - and both are glorious, perched on ridiculously steep hillsides (for protection from Franks and Turks and others), with a walled fortress area on the top, and then (also walled) layers of houses, churches and alleyways below. 

Looking at Mystras from below. The fortress (at the top) and upper town below that. The nobles lived just below the fortress, where they were safer from attack, and ordinary people lived in the lower town, which was also walled. The peasants/farmers lived outside the city walls, where they weren't safe at all, but came inside in times of danger.

the lower part of Mystras, from above

Monemvasia has the added frisson of being tucked into a large rock (think Gibraltar), so when you look at it from the land side you wouldn’t even know there was a town there at all. 

Where's Monemvasia?

Boo! There it is! (Just practising my granny games...)

While Mystras is purely an archeological site, albeit a fabulous one with several complete buildings, Monemvasia’s Lower Town is still inhabited. This has the advantage that you can sit drinking Greek red wine in a bar in a little street looking at the sea, and imagine yourself back in the 14th century. The guide book mentions “an enormous dollop of romance” for “couples wandering hand-in hand down the cobbled lanes”. Cynical unromantic old-hand travellers (like Geoff) found it a bit kitsch and touristy, but I secretly rather liked it, particularly that its tiny steep lanes make it impossible to get cars in. The (romantic?) young couples were having a hard time getting their pushchairs up the main street, let alone anything bigger. 

One of the many squares, and even many-er churches in Monemvasia

We spent a happy afternoon/evening wandering around the Lower Town and sitting in cafes. Then the following morning - a Sunday - we headed up the rock, along a tiny, steep alleyway, to explore the castle and the Upper Town. We were slightly dismayed at the number of other visitors going up the path (did we have to go at the same time as a large Greek package tour?) until we realised we had hit upon the saint's day of the newly-renovated Church of Agia Sofia - September 17.  The people greeting each other on the way up the hill were locals going up for the inaugural saint’s day service.

The large Byzantine church, one of 27 (27!) places of worship in the relatively small town, was built in 1149 and has an impressive dome and (apparently, we couldn’t get in!) fragments of 13th century frescos inside. It is built on the edge of a cliff with amazing views of the bay, and for the saint’s day was absolutely packed with worshippers.

They crowded the doorway, watching the priest (Greek priests are so impressive, with their untrimmed beards and wide-sleeved cassocks, their robes and, often, their black chimney-pot hats). Those who couldn’t get inside spilled out of the door, some chatting on the benches outside, others joining in the service through the window, chanting the responses, kneeling and standing, and crossing themselves at the relevant moments etc.  
The sun shone and it was magical. And we even saw a tortoise. A real live wild one.

Admiring Monemvasia

Gerald Durrell eat your heart out!