Thorn in the Paw

Ancient city-states of the Peleponnese

Have you been daydreaming of exotic places to go when we're sprung from this long term of house arrest (and the rest of the world will let us travel there again)?  Well, I've got one for you.

You would think that since Greece has been heavily visited by tourists since even the Roman era it has been pretty much been traveled, explored and photographed.  But take a look at those three strangely shaped peninsulas than hang from the southern shore of the Peleponnese.  The central of these three prongs is formed by the ridge of the Taygetus Mountains and is known as the Mani.  It was still mostly inaccessible when Patrick Lee Fermor boldly went there in 1958 despite no good roads and its fearsome reputation.  The area had been forgotten for centuries before he published Mani, Travels in the Southern Peleponnese.  He and his wife loved it so much they settled permanently in 1964.

The unoccupied remains of stone tower houses were to be found all over, and as in other lands beset by violence like Corsica, Sicily, the Balkans and the Caucasus, they mutely made it clear this was no Elysium or Acadia.  Other than column parts and building stones that have been continuously recycled, nothing remains of ancient Grecian civilization.

Although the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople in 1453, a fragment of the Byzantine Empire held on in the Mani until 1460.  However well they had secured so much of the known world, the Ottomans never did effect much control in this peninsula, either military or civilian.  They made a big push to do so in 1477 and suffered a large defeat from the locals and Venetian mercenary forces in 1481, but when they renewed their efforts, the mercenaries had to flee by ship.  Despite this, the Mani always remained a thorn in the paw of the mighty beast that was the Ottoman realm.

Year after year of war between the Turks and Venetians and local allies with both or neither left a devastated landscape and a poor economy.  Overpopulation was a constant drain despite the worsening lack of resources, and the Maniots emigrated worldwide (even to Florida).  Those who remained lived with banditry, constant vendettas (fueled by a persistent superstition that the dead, if not avenged, would return to haunt their families) and pirate attacks.  As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, they moved their towns and villages to the interior, away from the dangerous coasts.  Another way to deal with raiders was to become pirates themselves:  as a visitor noted, "boats...abounded in every creek...long and narrow like canoes, with ten...even thirty men armed with rifle and pistols..." 

These unbowed people could be an example for us on living through difficult times.