Mystras

Mystras is best in the late afternoon. The frescoes in the surviving churches (the Pantanassa, the Peribleptos and the Hodegetria) face east. In the second half of the day, the long, low light from the west reaches the gilded haloes through the windows above the apses. Arrive at 3pm or 4pm, walk the upper town first, and come down through the lower town as the light moves.

William II of Villehardouin, the Frankish prince of Achaea, founded the town in 1249 as a hilltop fortress on a spur of Mount Taygetus above the Eurotas valley. After his defeat and capture at the Battle of Pelagonia in 1259, he was forced to cede the castle to the Byzantines. Over the next two centuries Mystras grew into the seat of the Despotate of the Morea, the last significant Byzantine territory before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The town was lived in until 1953, when the modern village of Nea Mystras was built below to rehouse the residents.

The philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon taught here in the early fifteenth century. He revived pure Platonism from manuscripts of Plato kept in Byzantine libraries. In 1438 he took it with him to Florence, where he attended the Council of Florence as part of the Byzantine delegation. His meeting with Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine humanists led directly to the founding of the Platonic Academy, and to the chain of ideas that became the Italian Renaissance. The line from this hilltop to fifteenth-century Italy grows more astonishing the more time you give it.

The Pantanassa, the youngest of the major churches, is still home to a small community of nuns. Its early fifteenth-century frescoes, in the late Palaiologan style, are the high point of the visit. Allow at least two hours on site, three if you can, and stay the night in Mystras village or in Sparta below.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Kalamata airport is an hour and a half west across the Taygetus, and Athens is three hours north-east by motorway via Tripolis. The site stands 5 kilometres above the modern town of Sparta in the Eurotas valley. Mystras village, just below the gate, has the small inns, and Sparta has the working hotels.

  2. The address

    Pyrgos of Mystra, a stone mansion of 11 rooms on D. Manousaki Street, is the closest base to the site gate and the only registered hotel in Mystras village itself. It is open all year. For a luxury stay, the alternative is to base at Costa Navarino or Nafplio and make Mystras a day trip.

  3. The Pantanassa founder

    Giannis Frankopoulos, chief minister of the Despotate of the Morea, dedicated the Pantanassa in September 1428. Its carved stone exterior sets Western Gothic details on a Byzantine church: pointed arches frame some windows, festoons run across the apses, and the tall bell tower is Frankish in style. It is the only monastery at Mystras still home to a religious community, a small order of nuns who keep the gate.

  4. The Aphendiko

    The Brontochion Monastery, founded by the monk Pachomios and completed around 1310, was the wealthiest house at Mystras. Its main church, the Hodegetria, known locally as the Aphendiko, set the pattern for the so-called Mystras type: a three-aisled basilica below and a five-domed cross-in-square church above. Theodore I Palaiologos, the second despot, is buried in the church.

  5. The Peribleptos cave

    Manuel Kantakouzenos, the first Despot of the Morea, built the Peribleptos into the side of the cliff between 1365 and 1374, so the rock face is the rear wall of the nave. Its frescoes are the most lavishly preserved late Byzantine cycle at Mystras, a rare survival of the Palaiologan school.

  6. Plethon’s bones

    The philosopher Gemistos Plethon died at Mystras in 1452, two years before the city fell. In 1466 a party of his Italian disciples, led by Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, stole his remains and reburied them in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, where they rest in a sarcophagus on the south wall.

  7. The Palace

    The Palace of the Despots, the only surviving Byzantine palace anywhere, is the L-shaped block above the lower town, built in four phases between the 13th and 15th centuries. A €7.5 million restoration, announced in May 2024 and funded through the Recovery and Resilience Facility, covers its decorations, frescoes and stone elements.

  8. The proclamation

    Constantine XI Palaiologos was proclaimed Emperor of the Romans at Mystras on 6 January 1449 in a small civil ceremony, possibly at the Metropolis of Agios Demetrios and possibly inside the palace. He left for Constantinople in the spring and died on its walls four years later. The last Byzantine emperor was crowned in this provincial capital because the Patriarch in Constantinople would not bless him.

  9. The window

    From April to August the site opens at 8am and closes at 8pm, with last admission 20 minutes before closing. The afternoon is the best time, when the western light moves across the frescoes through the apse windows. In the shoulder seasons, avoid Tuesdays because of the closure cycle.

  10. The oil

    Lakonia olive oil holds PGI status, a protected EU mark of origin, for the groves on the Taygetus and Parnonas slopes that frame the Eurotas valley below the site. Koroneiki is the main variety, and the region tends around 12 million trees and produces roughly a tenth of the olive oil Greece makes each year. The valley mills sell direct in winter.

Mythology

  1. Menelaus

    The Menelaion stands at Therapne, on a spur above the Eurotas a short way east of Sparta and in the same valley as Mystras. Pausanias saw a temple of Menelaus there and was told that Menelaus and Helen were buried inside it. The spur is now an open-air archaeological site.

  2. Thanatos

    Pausanias saw images of Sleep and of Death on the acropolis of Sparta, beside the altar of Athena of the Bronze House and near two statues of Pausanias, the Spartan general at Plataea. That ground is the old city of Sparta in the Eurotas valley, below the hill of Mystras.