Pirgos Mavromichali is a restored 18th-century tower on the historic harbour of Limeni, in Laconian Mani, looking out over the bay. The name on it is the family’s own. The Mavromichalis line made Limeni its seat, raised its tower houses along this harbour, and produced the man who raised the first flag of the Greek revolution.
Limeni was the port of Areopoli, 5 kilometres inland, and it is 27 kilometres from Gythio. It was also the family’s own settlement, which is why Petrobey Mavromichalis has both his tomb and his bust in the village. A guest at the tower sleeps on Mavromichalis ground, in a building the family raised in the 18th century and that has been fully restored as a house of nine rooms.
The rooms and the table
The restored tower has nine rooms in all, sorted into six named categories. The ladder runs from the Classic Room, through the Superior Courtyard, the Sea View Superior and the Side Sea View Superior, up to the Deluxe Suite and the Tower Suite. The Tower Suite is the one inside the tower itself, a two-storey suite with sea views. The interiors are spare, in earthy colours, with island touches.
The kitchen cooks Greek and Mediterranean dishes from local products, on a menu the house wrote itself.
The family and the flag
The family tells its own story from 1340. Ottoman raiders crossed the Hellespont that year and fell on the Greeks of Eastern Thrace, and some families from the village of Kardia left by boat, reaching Alika in Mani. Among them was an orphaned boy called Michalis. Mani held that an orphan with no family carried a black fate, mavro, so he was renamed Mavromichalis, Black Michael. He married a local landlord’s daughter and had four sons, and the four branches of the family come down from them.
An 18th-century descendant, Georgakis, was known by the Byzantine title of Exarhos, governor of Mani. He married a fair-skinned, blonde, green-eyed woman who spoke no Greek, and local tradition had it that he had enchanted a Nereid, a nymph of spring and cave, and married her by stealing her scarf. Maniots afterwards put the family’s looks and charm down to that union. One account identifies her as a daughter of Francisco Morosini, the Doge of Venice, sent to Mani by boat to put her beyond his wife’s anger. Georgakis’s son Pierros was the father of Petros, who became Bey of Mani and is known as Petrobey.
At Limeni the family built four tower houses, the last of them the mansion they called the Palace, ringed by the other towers. The Palace stands apart from this house. One of the family’s towers in the village was built in 1762 by Pierros, and local records called it a mess hall, because Petrobey kept it as the place where the chieftains gathered and ate.
On 17 March 1821 Petrobey raised the first flag of the revolution in the town square at Tsimova, now Areopoli: a blue cross on a white field carrying the words of the family crest, Niki H Thanatos, Victory or Death. With some 2,500 armed men, he and his brothers, uncles, sons and cousins then attacked and took the castle of Kalamata. Mani had never been held by Turk, Venetian or Frank, and the rising spread from it to the rest of Greece.
Who is this for
It suits a couple who want the building to be the reason for the trip, and a traveller who reads a place through its families. Limeni is stone houses standing in almost transparent water, well protected in a bay, with rock in and out of the sea and the Messinian Gulf beyond. Most visitors choose the large beach between Neo Itilo and Karavostasi. Gythio, the Diros cave, Vathia and Areopoli are each worth a stop, and there are churches to see such as Agios Sostis.
