An Athenian Diary

12

Monemvasia. A Byzantine City in the

Southeastern Peloponnesus

Monemvasia means "one entryway" in Greek, and once you've seen the site, you know why. It occupies a massive rock that rises several hundred feet out of the shimmering waters of the Gulf of Monemvasia, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel that's crossed by a causeway with a bridge. Sometime in the sixth century CE, settlers from Sparta first occupied the site and founded a small town there. (Historians debate whether the settlement resulted from refugees fleeing the onslaught of Slavic invaders or, according to a document discovered by Haris Kalligas, was a planned community set up by the Byzantine state with state help to promote commerce.) The place thrived, and became both a regional focus of political, military, and economic activity, and a prize for whoever sought to control the Peloponnesus. In 1460 the whole of the Peloponnesus passed from Byzantine to Ottoman control, but Monemvasia resisted four more years, under the suzerainty of the Pope. In 1464 the Venetians took over. Wars between the Venetians and the Ottomans destroyed the local economy; many inhabitants departed, and in 1540 the Venetians surrendered Monemvasia (and Nauplio) to the Ottomans. In the late 1600s the Venetians fought to recover the Peloponnesus (which was called the Morea); Monemvasia, last fortress to fall to them, in 1690, was made the capital of one of the four provinces of the Kingdom of the Morea. Many Greek families with Venetian ties that had emigrated to Candia (Krete) returned, and a very prosperous and creative period ensued. Then in 1715 the Venetians surrendered it again to the Ottomans, who controlled it again till 1822, when it became one of the first cities extracted from Ottoman authority to become part of the new country of Greece.

I spent a weekend here (without Edie and the kids, unfortunately) with a small group from the American School, guided by Haris Kalligas (gesturing, in the blue top). Haris is an architect by training and the outgoing director of the Gennadion Library, the large Byzantine and Early Modern collection attached to the School. For thirty years and more Haris and her husband Alexandros have studied Monemvasia, making plans of the whole city and advising property owners about historical renovation. The entire site is an historic preserve, and no one may make any changes to the buildings without approval of the Ministry of Culture.

My room was in one of the buildings operated by the Malvasia Hotel, a lovely Ottoman-style setting with low benches around the wall, a fireplace, carpets, wooden furniture, and a view of the sea. I awoke every morning to the chatter of birds in the tree outside the window and the sound of waves lapping against the shore, down by the sea wall.

The site is really two separate settlements, an upper town which was heavily fortified and defended, and a lower town where the residents dwelled. (Under the Ottomans non-Muslims were forbidden access to the upper town.) The lower town was occupied by sailors and merchants, reported in some sources to have been tough and blasphemous, as sailors are wont to be. The town was a lively center of commerce, exporting in particular the local wine called Malmsey in England, a corruption of Monemvasio. (The tavernas here still feature the local wine, a light rose served in glass pitchers.) The town remained healthy till twentieth century, when residents began to move to the mainland after refugees from Asia Minor settled there in 1922; after World War II almost all the population left, and by the 1960s the houses were largely abandoned and beginning to deteriorate. In those days a few enterprising people started buying up properties and renovating them. Some of the early renovations were done without any attention to the history of the architecture, but soon the Greek Archaeological Service intervened. They could not force people out (and this in my opinion is a good thing) but they were able to enforce rules about restoration requiring felicity to the date and style of the buildings. This was no easy requirement, given the many periods and styles represented (predominately Venetian and Ottoman from the second periods of occupation). Expertise of people like Haris and Alexandros became in great demand; they have overseen the restoration of a number of houses, including their own.

Today the lower town is best seen from above, a riot of red tiled roofs. The houses themselves are of local stone, with poros (sandstone) frames around windows and doors, or along the corners where two walls meet. (Unhistorical restorations are easily identified by the use of poros in the wrong places.)

The center of the lower town is a small plateia, surrounded by the church, a bell tower, the sea wall, and the current museum, which used to be a mosque. (There is no evidence of its former use left, but this is not true of other buildings in Monemvasia, as we will see.) In the center of the square stands a cannon, perhaps of Venetian manufacture (there are Roman numerals on it but no other identification I could see), reminder of the realities of power and violence that have so often dominated the history of this region.

The upper city is accessed via footpath leading up to a gate. Above lie the ruins of hundreds of buildings, many of unclear use, surrounded by the fortification wall. The upper city was more than just a fort; it was inhabited, and bears the signs of it. Most notable is the main church, often said to be dedicated to Hagia Sophia ("Divine Wisdom," not a saint but the wisdom of God), but probably in fact originally dedicated to Maria Odigitria. Inside, many of the frescos remain in pretty good shape.

The rest of the upper city consists of mostly ruins, but a few buildings remain, including a very impressive cistern with a huge collection area (one of the reasons that the fort was never taken by force, but always surrendered -- and why the limiting problem for defenders in sieges was food, not water.) Among the well-preserved buildings, however, is a türbe, a shrine to a Muslim saint; its form, a dome on four pillars, open on all sides, is familiar to anyone who has traveled in Turkey. That's as far up as I made it; rain had started, and it was late, so we headed back down for food and rest. Some of our group returned to see the chief fortress at the top (the Akropolis), but I must confess I preferred to keep warm in my room, enjoying the Ottoman ambience.

Outside of Monemvasia, in the villages and countryside that were the hinterland of the fort and town, are preserved a striking number of middle Byzantine churches (10th-12th century in date) which still have frescos dating from the original construction. We visited several, including two at the village of Hagios Nikolaos (that's St. Nicolas, the Lykian bishop become saint whose activities served as the model for Santa Claus), a church at Tairia with a Roman inscription reused as the altar-table, and one at Pantanassa-Geroumana, which may have been finished by the Franks. All are still used as churches. (At the last we were hosted by a delightful priest with a charming smile and obvious pride in his church, despite its tiny congregation of but forty.)

Monemvasia has been lucky to have found protectors, but it's real luck lies in the fact that it continued to be a real, living, inhabited town up to the cusp of modernity. The exigencies of modern life never quite hit it; like the waves lapping at the base of the mountain, they touched only its edges. The streets were never widened to permit the access of cars; the walls were never torn down to make space for new building (though this almost happened). As a result of this good fortune, we can get a sense today of what life was like in a late medieval Greco-Venetian-Ottoman city. Of course, there is a certain artificialty and preciousness to it all now; the people who have bought and lovingly restored the houses are upper middle class professionals, who require, as well as genuineness of architecture, electricity for their computers and warm bedrooms in the winter. In other words, gentrification is saving Monemvasia much as it is saving the brownstones of Brooklyn or Chicago. There are no more rowdy sailors or prostitutes; not too much genuineness!

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