Mani

The Mani is two regions, and the difference matters. Outer Mani, on the western side around Kardamyli and Stoupa, is gentler: olive groves, a green coastal slope, swimming coves and a moderate climate. Inner Mani, further south on the bare central spur of the peninsula, is the stone tower-house country of the postcards: drier, harsher and half-abandoned. Most luxury guests should base themselves in Outer Mani, ideally Kardamyli, and make day trips into Inner Mani for two of the best days of the trip.

The tower-houses are the architectural reason to come. From the late medieval period to the early nineteenth century, Maniot families built fortified stone towers two or three storeys high. Clan vendettas drove an arms race, and each tower rose slightly above its neighbours. The densest cluster is at Vathia, on a hillside above the south-eastern coast. It is now mostly empty and is slowly being restored as small guesthouses. The Ottomans never brought the peninsula effectively under their rule, and it stayed largely self-governing until the Greek state was formed.

Two natural sights anchor a Mani trip. The Diros Caves, on the western side of Inner Mani, are an underground river system. Visitors are punted by boat through some 800 metres of chambers hung with stalactites. Book early, because capacity is limited. Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of mainland Greece, was held in antiquity to be an entrance to the underworld. The walk out to the Roman lighthouse takes about 40 minutes each way and is one of the more atmospheric short walks in the country.

The Byzantine churches across the peninsula are the cultural reward. Episkopi near Stavri and Polemitas hold thirteenth- and fourteenth-century frescoes of remarkable intensity. Patrick Leigh Fermor lived in Kardamyli from 1964 until his death in 2011. His stone house, which he designed with his wife Joan, is now run by the Benaki Museum as a writer’s residency and is occasionally open. Read his Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese before you go.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Kardamyli, the head of Outer Mani, is an hour’s drive south of Kalamata airport, and Inner Mani (Areopoli and Limeni) is a further hour and a half. From Athens the drive takes four and a half hours on the motorway, plus the descent along the coast. The peninsula itself has no airfield.

  2. The address

    Kalamitsi Hotel stands on a private cove half a kilometre south of Kardamyli, and the same family has held it for two generations: Nikos and Theano Ponirea built it, and their descendants run it now. It has stone Maniot buildings, cottages spread among the olives and a pebbled beach below. The writer Bruce Chatwin wrote Songlines in Room 1 in the winter of 1985.

  3. The tower

    Pirgos Mavromichali, an 18th-century stone tower at the head of Limeni’s pirate bay, is the family’s restored seat, with nine rooms of vaulted ceilings and wooden floors and the sea or the courtyard at every window. The owners descend from Petrobey Mavromichalis, the last bey, or ruler, of Mani. It is the address for Inner Mani.

  4. The capital

    Areopoli is the capital of Inner Mani. Here Petros Mavromichalis raised the standard of revolt on 17 March 1821, eight days before the date that became the national holiday, and the tower of the Mavromichalis fortress complex still stands on the central square. Its lanes are paved in stone, and it is the working town of the peninsula.

  5. The Pikoulakis

    The Byzantine Museum of Mani is housed in the Pikoulakis Tower at Areopoli, a fortification of the post-Byzantine period that Ioannis Pikoulakis donated to the State. Its permanent exhibition, ‘Stories of the religious faith of Mani’, draws on the peninsula’s churches across the Byzantine and post-Byzantine centuries, with painted icons, fragments and marble carvings.

  6. The House

    Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor’s house at Kalamitsi was donated to the Benaki Museum in 1996, and its restoration finished in 2019. Visits are by ticket bought online only: on Mondays from 11am to 12pm in winter, and on Mondays at 12pm from June to September. An hour is enough, and the writer’s study is the centrepiece.

  7. The chapel

    Agios Nikolaos is a small 10th-century Byzantine chapel on the edge of Exohori, 8 kilometres above Kardamyli on the lower slope of the Taygetus. Bruce Chatwin’s ashes were laid under its olive tree in 1989, at a spot Patrick Leigh Fermor and Elizabeth Chatwin chose. The walk up is steep and rewards the climb.

  8. Old Kardamyli

    A stone path opposite the main square climbs to Old Kardamyli, the abandoned upper village above the modern town, restored around the Mourtzinos Tower that the Troupakis-Mourtzinos clan held. It has walled courtyards, a small church and the trailhead for the kalderimi, the old stone-paved paths, into Viros Gorge and onto Taygetus.

  9. The siglino

    Siglino is the emblematic cured pork of Mani: the meat is salted, smoked over sage, boiled with bitter-orange peel and stored in clay laenia pots under royal fat and oil. It is prepared in November and kept through the year. It is served with eggs, with a pilaf of fennel and broad beans, or sliced cold beside Maniot oranges.

  10. The Iliad

    In Book 9 of the Iliad, Agamemnon offers Achilles seven cities of the western Peloponnese if he returns to the fight, and Kardamyli is one of them. The name has held ever since. A reader who knows the line will find that this is the same village Homer named.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Limeni

    Limeni is the harbour of Areopoli, the Mani capital a mile and a half up the hill: a small turquoise cove of tower-houses on the Bay of Oitylo. It was the seat of the Mavromichalis clan, whose last bey, or ruler, Petrobey, raised the first flag of the 1821 revolt at Areopoli above. A yacht lies in the little bay under the towers, with the bare grey mountains of the Deep Mani beyond.

  2. Stoupa

    Stoupa is on the Outer Mani coast, a sandy bay on the softer, greener northern peninsula, below the Frankish castle of Leuktron. Kazantzakis worked a mine near here and set his Zorba in the country around, and the cold freshwater springs of Kalogria rise along the shore. A yacht lies off the sand, at the last easy resort before the towers and stone of the Deep Mani to the south.

  3. Gerolimenas

    Gerolimenas is a village in the southwest of the Deep Mani whose name is “Old Harbour”, from the ancient Hieros Limen, the Sacred Harbour. It was a real fishing port once, with a shipyard, an ice house and a fish market, before the tourists came, and 88 people live here now. A yacht lies in the small bay under the cliffs, in one of the emptiest corners of the peninsula.

  4. Porto Kagio

    Porto Kagio is the almost landlocked bay at the southeast tip of the Mani, 3 miles north of Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of the mainland. The Venetians called it Porto Quaglio and the French Port des Cailles, the Quail Port, where the birds cross on migration, and the Ottomans fortified it in 1568 before the corsair Katsonis used it as a base. A yacht lies in the bay at the end of Greece, with the open sea and the cape beyond.

Mythology

  1. Arion

    The dolphin carries Arion ashore at Tainaron, the cape at the southern end of the Mani. Herodotus records a small bronze offering there of a man riding a dolphin, and Pausanias later saw a bronze Arion on a dolphin among the offerings on the cape.

  2. Cape Tainaron

    Thucydides records that the sanctuary of Poseidon here protected suppliants, and that the Spartans once dragged out and killed Helots who had taken refuge in it. The Spartans later blamed the earthquake that levelled their city on the act, and a generation afterward the same right was used to trap their own regent, Pausanias.

  3. Cerberus

    Apollodorus places the way down to Hades at Cape Tainaron, at the end of the Mani, where Heracles goes down to fetch Cerberus. Pausanias saw a temple like a cave there with a statue of Poseidon in front, found no road underground, and gave instead the view of Hecataeus that a poisonous snake on the cape was called the hound of Hades.

  4. Hades

    At Cape Tainaron in the Mani, Strabo records a cave that writers of myth named as the passage through which Heracles brought Cerberus from Hades. The sanctuary on the headland belonged to Poseidon. The tie to the underworld came from the story told about the cave.