Pylos

Pylos is on the Bay of Navarino in the south-western Peloponnese, where the olive country of Messenia runs down to a natural harbour. For most luxury travellers the address is Costa Navarino, the resort coast a little to the north. The town itself is small, arcaded around a single square, and it is the working town beside the resorts.

The long island of Sphacteria closes off the bay, and the sheltered water inside it has seen more history than its calm suggests. In 425 BC an Athenian force trapped and took a Spartan garrison on Sphacteria, one of the turning points of the Peloponnesian War. In October 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, the combined British, French and Russian fleets destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian navy here. The battle effectively secured Greek independence. The Ottoman fortress of Niokastro, above the southern entrance, is among the best preserved in Greece and holds a small museum.

Costa Navarino is the reason most guests come, and it is the most ambitious resort development in the country. It was built over the past 15 years across several sites, among them Navarino Dunes, Navarino Bay and Navarino Romanos on the hillside. It brings golf, a serious spa and real care for the Messenian countryside and its farming into a single estate. It is a destination in its own right. Whether you ever leave its grounds is a real question, and the answer should be yes.

Natural sights are close at hand. Voidokilia, a few minutes north, is an almost perfect crescent of pale sand around a shallow lagoon. Behind it lies the Gialova wetland, the southernmost important stop for migrating birds in the Balkans. In spring it is home to flamingos and to the African chameleon, which lives almost nowhere else in Europe. On the ridge above stands the Palace of Nestor, the best-preserved Mycenaean palace on the mainland. The Linear B tablets found there in 1939 proved that the script was an early form of Greek.

South of the bay are the Venetian sea castles of Methoni and Koroni, the eyes of the Republic that once guarded the route to the Levant. Each repays a half-day. At Methoni the curtain wall runs out across a causeway to a small fortified tower standing in the water. Kalamata airport is about an hour east and takes direct European flights in season. Athens is nearer four hours by road. Three or four nights, with a hire car, is the right length.

House Notes

  1. The address

    Mandarin Oriental, Costa Navarino, the group’s first house in Greece, sits on its own stretch of Navarino Bay, with 99 suites and villas stepped down toward the water. The five-bedroom Royal Villa, designed by MKV Design, has its own spa, fitness room and pool. Each standalone villa has a pool of its own and an open view across the bay to Sphacteria.

  2. The courses

    Costa Navarino has four golf courses across two sites. The Dunes Course, by Bernhard Langer with European Golf Design, was the first signature course in Greece, and Robert Trent Jones Jr laid out the Bay Course beside it, its par-three second hole running along the shore of Navarino Bay. Up at Navarino Hills, José María Olazábal designed the Hills Course and the International Olympic Academy Course.

  3. Palaiokastro

    Palaiokastro, the castle the Franks built in the 13th century on the headland above Voidokilia, is the older of the fortresses watching over the bay. Venetians and Ottomans held it after them, until it was abandoned in 1573 once Niokastro rose across the water. The climb from the lagoon is steep and rocky, and the Cave of Nestor opens below the walls.

  4. The Griffin Warrior

    In 2015, on the first day of a new season at the Palace of Nestor, Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis of the University of Cincinnati opened an undisturbed shaft grave in an olive grove at Ano Englianos. The Bronze Age warrior inside lay with more than 1,400 objects, in one of the richest intact graves found in Greece in decades. The finds are conserved for display at the Archaeological Museum of Chora, inland from the bay.

  5. The spa

    Anazoe Spa, shared by the Romanos and the Westin at Navarino Dunes, bases its signature treatments on oleotherapy: olive-oil and herb treatments drawn from prescriptions inscribed on clay tablets found in the ruins of the nearby Palace of Nestor. The anti-inflammatory massage oil is pressed from sweet almonds and the estate’s own olives.

  6. The vines

    Navarino Vineyards, the estate’s own 550 acres in the hills behind Pylos, carries the place’s history into the glass. The 1827 wines take their name from the year of the sea battle fought in the bay below, and the KOTYLE label is named for the kotyle, the ancient drinking cup. Both are poured across the resort’s tables, a Messenian answer to the cellar.

  7. Koroni

    Koroni’s castle, rebuilt by the Venetians in 1209 to hold the sea road east, is a rare fortress that was never abandoned. Inside the walls, lanes of Venetian doorways climb to the Timios Prodromos convent, founded in the early 20th century at the fortress’s highest point and kept by its nuns. The drive down the Messenian gulf from Pylos takes the better part of an hour.

  8. Polylimnio

    Inland from the bay, past the village of Charavgi, the Polylimnio gorge holds a chain of 15 pools and waterfalls in deep shade, with emerald water, smoothed rock and the Kalouda fall dropping some 25 metres into the lake beneath it. A walking path threads the pools; wear sturdy shoes and start early, before the day-trippers. The gorge lies 34 kilometres from Kalamata.

  9. The larder

    Navarino Icons, the food and craft line Costa Navarino launched in 2011, presses its extra-virgin olive oil from the Messenian groves and turns the rest of the harvest into olives, pasteli (sesame and honey bars) and fruit spoon sweets. The same line orders ceramics and paper goods from local makers, with motifs drawn from Mycenaean pattern. They are a considered thing to carry home.

  10. The table

    Notre Maison, on the pedestrian seafront at Gialova, is the kitchen worth booking: a family house run by Giannis with his wife Kiki and their children. The cooking follows what the day brings, from fish off the bay to the wild mushrooms Giannis forages himself on Taygetos. The tables sit a few steps from the water, with Sphacteria across the strait.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The Bay of Navarino

    The Bay of Navarino is one of the great natural harbours of the Mediterranean, 5 kilometres by 3, closed off from the open sea by the long island of Sphacteria. Here on 20 October 1827, the allied fleets of Britain, France and Russia destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian navy in the last great battle fought under sail, with most of the ships at anchor. The battle made Greek independence certain, and a yacht now lies in a bay that once held three fleets.

  2. Pylos

    Pylos town stands at the southern entrance of the bay, at the foot of Mount Agios Nikolaos. Its French-planned square of arcades was laid out in 1829 below the Niokastro, the New Navarino fortress that the Ottoman admiral Uluç Ali built in 1573 and one of the best-preserved castles in Greece. A yacht lies in the town harbour under the walls, at the mouth of the great bay.

  3. Sphacteria

    Sphacteria is the long, uninhabited island that closes the bay: 3 square kilometres of rock and some of the most fought-over ground in Greek history. Here in 425 BC the Athenians took a Spartan force prisoner, a shock in the Peloponnesian War, and here in 1827 the allied and Ottoman fleets burned. The island forms the whole seaward wall of the bay where a yacht lies.

  4. Voidokilia

    Voidokilia is a curve of sand at the north end of the bay, shaped almost exactly like the Greek letter omega: a semicircle of dunes and one of the most photographed beaches in Greece. Behind it lie the Gialova lagoon and its birds, and in the rock above is Nestor’s Cave, where Homer’s king is said to have kept his cattle. A yacht lies off the crescent, with the Frankish castle of Old Navarino on the height above.

Mythology

  1. Poseidon

    In the third book of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachus comes ashore at Pylos while nine groups of 500 people each sacrifice 81 bulls to Poseidon on the beach.

  2. Nestor

    The geographer Strabo records a saying that there was ‘a Pylos before Pylos, and yet another Pylos,’ and reports that people from Elis and from Messenia each claimed that Nestor’s title Gerenian came from a place in their own land. Apollodorus makes it simpler and has Neleus, Nestor’s father, found Pylos in Messenia.

  3. Telemachus

    Telemachus arrives at Pylos while Nestor and his people sacrifice to Poseidon on the shore. On this visit, ordered by Athena, he first questions a veteran of Troy about Odysseus.

  4. The Iliad

    The Catalogue of Ships in Book 2 gives Pylos and the towns of the Alpheius country their own contingent, 90 hollow ships ranged with the horseman, Nestor of Gerenia. The same entry stops at Dorium, where the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian and made an end of his singing.

  5. The Return from Troy

    At Pylos, Nestor tells Telemachus how he saw the fleet divide and how he sailed straight home with Diomedes. His safe return is the clearest contrast with the losses that follow the other Greek leaders.

  6. The Trojan War

    In the stories of the war, Nestor’s is the one easy return: in the Odyssey he describes a sacrifice at Tenedos, a debated route past Chios, and a fair wind home to “the well-built citadel of Neleus,” and in the summary of the lost Nostoi he and Diomedes reach home safely while the Locrian Ajax is wrecked and Agamemnon is murdered. The palace that archaeologists identify as his, at Ano Englianos above the Bay of Navarino, was found in 1939 and stood from about 1300 to 1200 BC until a fire destroyed it.