Messinia Throughout the course of history

All of the historical periods of our country are retold in Messinia, in very rich chapters. The region was inhabited from the Neolithic era (6,000 – 3,000 BC), and there are indications leading us even further back, to the Palaeolithic period. This is confirmed by a number of prehistoric sites that excavations have located mainly in the north-west of the prefecture (Malthi, Koryfasio, Eglianos, Chora, etc.). Somewhere between myth and history, in the Bronze era, circa 1,900 BC, it is believed that the Indo-European races settled in the southern Helladic peninsula; these peoples are considered to be the first Greeks. The peak of this civilization, which is known as the Mycenaean civilization, is placed circa 1,600-1,200 BC. As the texts of the ancient Greeks and Latin writers tell us, the first residents of the region were descendants of Lelegas, King of Laconia, and the Caucones from Eleusis. Polykaon, son of Lelegas, and his wife, Messene, brought an army from Argos and settled in the region, which takes its name from this first queen. Their dynasty lasted for five generations. The Aeolians later descended with Perieres, who married Gorgophone, daughter of Perseus. They had two sons, Aphareus and Leucippus. The first was the founder of Arene. Aphareus, at the order of Poseidon, gave up the part of his kingdom that faced the sea to Neleus, who arrived as an exile from Iolcos. Neleus was based in Pylos, and as Aphareus had no heirs, when Nestor, the son of Neleus, rose to the throne he inherited the Aphareus’ kingdom. Nestor, whose kingdom extended – to the north – up to the River Alpheios, and to the south-east almost to Taygetos, in Ancient Phares (today’s Kalamata), died after he came back from the terrible ten year war in Troy. Two generations later, the Dorians invaded his kingdom.

The Mycenaean findings discovered in the region, and those brought to light by the excavations, bear witness to the extent, the power and the might of this civilization in Messenia, which is proven to have been the most densely populated region of Peloponnesus. In at least 50 locations, (Volimidia Chora, Koryfasio, Malthi, Rizomylos, Vigla, Harokopio, Thouria, Ano Eglianos, Tragana, Myrsinochori and Papoulia among them) tholos and rock-cut tombs, ruins of buildings, rich ceramics and other grave offerings are testimony of the economic vigour and social development of the Mycenaean civilization in the region. There is no longer any doubt that the Palace of Pylos in Ano Eglianos is the kingdom of Nestor, the son of Neleus. The fair, wise, eloquent, tireless and war experienced; prudent advisor and good speaker, Nestor is the one who speaks to the Achaeans and reconciles them in their disputes in front of the walls of Troy, and becomes an example of gentleness and prudence throughout the entire Greek world. The end of the Mycenaean civilization finally came about owing to a more generalized unrest and upheaval across the entire Helladic world towards the end of the second millennium BC.

When the Dorians arrived, they destroyed the Mycenaean centres. According to the myth, the sons of Temenus, Cresphontes and Aristodemus claimed the region. In the end, Cresphontes won Messenia by drawing lots. Some of the residents at the time agreed to share their land with the new conquerors while others left for Attica, or even further afield, for Asia Minor. Cresphontes built his palace in Stenyclarus (today the valley of Meligalas) and as his governance was mostly for the people, the rich revolted, killing him and his sons; all apart from one, who later took revenge upon his father’s murderers. It was in the years of the successors of Cresphontes, that the Messenians had their first bloody conflict with the Spartans, and thus the three terrible Messenian Wars followed, which lasted from 743 to 454 BC, ending with the complete submission of the region to Sparta.

Around the mid-eighth century BC, the Spartans, after a failed conspiracy against the Messenians a few years before, asked for some new concessions. The two kings of Messenia had different opinions on this matter. Antiochus was opposed, while Androcles was in favour of the concessions they were asking for. Their disagreement led to civil war. The Spartans seized the opportunity and attacked Messenia, taking it by surprise. This is how the first Messenian War started, in 735 BC, and which lasted for 20 years. The Spartans entered the territory of Messenia, and based from Ampheia, started the raids and looting. The first battle in 731 BC took place without a clear victor. Messenian mercenaries and slaves were defecting to the Spartan camp and eventually these Messenian aggressors based themselves in Ithome. In collaboration with the Arcadians, they also began to attack and to loot the Laconian land. A second large-scale conflict took place in 722 BC, when the Messenians, allied with the Arcadians, Argives and Sicyonians, faced the Spartans who were allied with the Corinthians. The Messenians sustained heavy losses and submission was unavoidable. King Aristodemus took his own life, while Ithome was abandoned. The Spartans took Stenyclarus, split up the land into allotments and distributed it. This was in the year 715 BC, and for 50 years the situation remained the same. A new opportunity for an uprising presented itself in 669 BC when the Spartans returned exhausted, having sustained heavy losses after their long war with the Argives for the possession of Thyreatis, which did not produce a victor. The Messenians found the opportunity to revolt, and hence the second Messenian War began. When the Spartans lost Stenyclarus, their allottees found themselves cornered. The attacks and counter-attacks were followed by battles, until around 667 BC, when the Messenians were forced to withdraw to Mount Ithome from where they could attack their neighbouring enemies, while the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus encouraged his compatriots with his famous patriotic poems. After many years of battle, the Spartans, in 657 BC, took back Ithome and redistributed the area to their allottees. However, they met with strong resistance from, the local population, who revolted many times. Finally, circa 600 BC, the Spartans prevailed in almost the entire region of Messenia, to Pylos and Methone, and remained masters of it for 150 years. After the second Messenian War, several Messenians left for Sicily, where they founded Messene.

The so-called third Messenian War started in 464 BC, after there was a powerful earthquake in Sparta and the city was destroyed; the slaves then revolted. The Spartans, after ten years of war alongside their allies, the Athenians, who sent 4,000 men, defeated the Messenians once again, who now, exhausted, gave up to the Spartans the fort they had taken cover in, and were forced to leave Peloponnesus and find refuge in Naupactus, where they stayed until 369 BC, when the Thebans won over the Spartans in Leuctra, and they could finally return to their land.

During the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War, in 425 BC, in the region of Pylos – Sfaktiria, perhaps the most dramatic battle for the Spartans took place; a painful chapter in their military pride, when the Athenian army moored in the secure bay and took cover in Koryfasio. The Lacedaemonians, realizing the danger, recalled their army and fleet from other positions and camped in the cove of the bay, while a select corps landed on the island. Athenian reinforcements arrived, and the conflict was terrifying and condemning for the Spartans. As Thucydides writes, “the Athenians … are fighting from the ships … and the Lacedaemonians … are fighting from the land.” After 72 days of siege, the 292 Spartans who were trapped in Sfaktiria gave themselves up. Their capture was the first insulting defeat of the Lacedaemonians on their own land. The glorious marble Nike of Paeonius (in the Museum of Ancient Olympia), was dedicated by the Naupactians and the Messenians, to serve as a reminder of the event for all eternity.

19th-century illustration, “Epaminondas saves the Life of Pelopidas,” drawn by H. Vogel. Pelopidas is saved by Theban general Epaminondas in this scene from the Battle of Manineia, fought in 385 B.C.

The end of the Peloponnesian War found Sparta the victor, prevailing over all city-states. But in 371 BC, Sparta was at war again, this time with Thebes. The Theban general, Epaminondas crossed Peloponnesus and founded cities in order to weaken Sparta. After Epaminondas founded the capital of the new autonomous Messenia in 369 BC, the residents of the region made a concerted effort to bridge the gap created by the long Spartan occupation, and caught up at a fast pace. The new city was built according to the Hippodamian system, and over the Roman period it was to grow into a remarkable political and artistic centre. Our admiration today must turn to the modern restorations and layouts, which highlight one of the most impressive archaeological sites, and convey something of their ancient glory to the ruins.

After the death of Epaminondas, the Spartans attempted to occupy Messene. Athenians, Arcadians and Argives took up the cause of the Messenians, and finally, the once powerful Sparta was forced to acknowledge the freedom of the Messenians. Up until the Roman occupation, Messenia was to be destroyed twice; once in 214 BC by Pharus, the general of Philip V, and once in 202 BC by the tyrant of Sparta, Navi. In 191 BC, Messenia was included in the Achaean League, as were all the cities of Peloponnesus. However, in the end the new rising power of Rome conquered the region and a large part of Greece, in 146 BC.

From the fourth to the ninth century AD, with the raids of the Vandals, Goths, Avarians, Slavs and Arabs, coastal settlements slowly started to form, which grew into important cities over the next centuries, such as Kalamata, Koroni, Methoni, Navarino and Arcadia (in ancient Kyparissia). Over the first ten Christian centuries, silence covers most monuments (churches and monasteries) strewn all over Messenia. Mount Taygetus however, then known as Pentadaktylos, would once again serve not only as the boundary of Messenia and Laconia, but also become the bone of contention and opportunity for dramatic events to unfold, as they did during the Messenian wars. During the Byzantine period it would again become the stage for population and cultural processes that would seal the fortune of the Messenian area. Also, the activity of Nikon from Pontus, from the one end of Pentadaktylos to the other, in around 970 AD, spread his worship, and southern Peloponnesus acquired its own great saint.

The splitting up of the Byzantine Empire by the Franks and Latins of the fourth Crusade brought Geoffrey of Villehardouin to conquer Morea and found the principality of Achaea. He kept the baronets of Arcadia and Kalamata, which became his base, and ceded Stenyklarus to the baron Luke, while Nickolas II of Saint Omer reigned over the region of Pylos and founded Paliokastro in 1278, a fortified look-out for the control of the seas and the shores. The son of Geoffrey, William, was the first Villehardouin to be born in Morea and, in fact, in Kalamata. This daring personality of Frankish Occupied Peloponnesus built castles, and commerce flourished in his times and he minted his own coin, but was consumed by strife; and directly after his death the Franks started to fall apart in Morea. The strong coastal forts of Koroni and Methoni had already been taken by the Venetians, and they held them together with Navarino, even when the Franks – two hundred years later – left Morea, and the Byzantines, along with the Despotate of Mystras, practically controlled once more the entire Peloponnesus.

Conflict and a succession of conquerors: Franks, Venetians, Navarians, Genuates, prevailed until the mid-14th century, when the gradual conquest of regions and cities of Messenia started by the Ottoman Turks, which was completed by the end of the 15th century. In 1500, Methoni fell heroically, and almost all its inhabitants were massacred. The Ottomans, after their defeat in 1571 in the famous battle of Lepanto (Nafpaktos), chose as their new base the newly built Niokastro (1573) in Pylos.

The Venetians, led by Morosini, tried to take back Koroni. After a tough siege that lasted for months, reinforced by Maniates, Messenians and Heptanesians, and after terrible and relentless war, they conquered the castle of Koroni (1685). The Turks also tried to take Kalamata from the Venetians. Engravings from the 17th century (V.M. Coronelli, De Witt., J. Sandrart, Grimani, etc.) depict the fortified locations and the battles that took place in the area. The Venetians left Peloponnesus in 1714 and it was unfortunately the population that always bore the brunt of this succession of conquerors; the people paying with their lives and with the looting of their property.

During the 18th century, new financial structures started appearing, which would be the breeding ground for a new class: the middle class. Industry and commerce were becoming organized and commercial centres were created in the most important cities of Messenia, such as Arcadia, Methoni, Pylos, Koroni, Nissi, Androusa, Kalamata. The products of the region travelled abroad, but the populations were also suffering from epidemics. The uprising of the Orlofs, however, (in 1770), which was incited by Russian design to weaken the Ottoman Empire by making the Greeks revolt, failed, and the residents of Messenia paid with an atrocious massacre of its inhabitants at the hands of the Albanians.

On 21 March 1821, thousands of people, armed with anything they could get their hands on, marched on Kalamata, led by Papaflessas, Kolokotronis, Nikitaras and Petrobeis Mavromichalis. On 23 March 1821 the Doxology was sung in the Byzantine chapel of Agioi Apostoloi of Kalamata, and the revolutionary Messenian people and army received communion and swore for the Revolution, with the declaration towards European hegemonies that Greeks would henceforth be an independent nation. On 29 March 1821, the bishop of Methoni, Grigorios Papatheodorou, together with chieftains of the region, forced the Turks to stay in the fort of Methoni, while he went towards Pylos to participate in the uprising already organized by the Oikonomidis brothers, members of the Filiki Etairia (Friendly Society) from Pylos. The revolutionary wind of 1821 brought Niokastro into the hands of the Greeks from the first year (1821), which they held until the relentless appearance of Ibrahim, and those dreadful days of the spring of 1825 when the “harbour filled with the drowned bodies” and the mourning was profound.

In April of 1825 Niokastro and Paliokastro, which had been held by the Greeks from the start of the revolution (August 1821), underwent their toughest hardship. In the midst of the turbulence of political strife, the fight for the liberation had been paralyzed, and then Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, decided to reinforce the Turks in their effort to crush the revolution by sending his son Ibrahim on a campaign in Peloponnesus (1824-1827). Despite the heroic resistance of Papaflessas in Maniaki and the debacle of the Turkish army by the Maniates in Verga, Almyros, Ibrahim destroyed all of Peloponnesus, set it alight, cut 150,000 fruit-bearing trees and systematically massacred its population. When the pasha Ibrahim landed with his army in Methoni, in the February of 1825, he realized immediately that the bay of Navarino would be the most suitable to become the base for his fleet and his attacks. He relentlessly bombarded Niokastro, and landed with his army in Sfaktiria. The massacre that followed was terrible. The painting and the narrative note to the work of Panagiotis Zografos, “Siege and Battles of Navarino, 1825” gives us a picture, despite the folk style of the art, of the great massacre. The hero Makrygiannis in his Memoirs notes, “…And they did not leave us day or night, ceaseless war. The castle was rotting and collapsing; and we made cases with wood inside and filled them with dirt. And we worked and we fought day and night; and we went hungry. And most of us fell ill because of the battle and the thirst. The canonniers and geniers of Ibrahim were all French and they destroyed the castle… That day, my brothers, was very dreadful for the homeland, losing so many lads and important men, soldiers and sailors… the port filled with drowned bodies, like frogs in the swamp they floated on the sea. And the island and other places full of dead bodies…”

In the midst of the paradoxes and contradictions of political aspirations, the diplomatic agreements and military operations of the European states, when the “sick man of Europe”, that is to say, the Ottoman Empire, was already asking for the assistance of the Egyptians to crush the Greek Revolution, the signing of the Convention of London (6 July 1927) set the conditions for the independence of Greece. The international powers decided, in order to impose the conditions of the Convention and the final departure of the Turkish-Egyptian armies from the Greek territory, to send fleets to the eastern Mediterranean to enforce their policy if the Sublime Porte did not obey. Turkey did not comply and it reinforced the Arabian fleet that was already in Navarino.

Thus the Allied Fleet with 27 ships, 12 English under Codrington, seven French under Captain de Rigny, eight Russian under Captain Hayden, and 1,252 canons in total, entered the Bay of Sfaktiria on 20 October 1827, a sunny day with a calm sea. Across from them, the enemies had 91 ships with 2,158 shotguns. A “random event’, a shot with the first killed after the warnings, played the role of the “fateful event”… At around six in the evening all was over. When the smoke settled, the Turkish-Egyptian fleet had lost 60 ships, the Allies none; the enemies counted 6,000 dead and 4,000 injured, while the allies 174 dead and 475 injured. The next day, Ibrahim raised a white flag in Niokastro.

“The Turk was demolished the colossus by the Bull

Greece is free and with an ode of joy

For Navarino sings Byron from the grave”

 Victor Hugo, Navarin, Les Orientales, 1827

The redeeming battle of Navarino (1827) between the Turks-Egyptians and the Allied Fleet of the European powers sealed the coming of the new for the region and for Greece situation: freedom! The French Scientific Mission (1829) led by naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint Vincent, which followed the corresponding military mission, within the framework of its scientific work of recording the natural and archaeological landscape of Peloponnesus, made important drawings and texts for the region of Messenia, such as Navarino, Messene and Kyparissia, Methoni and others. Among the members of the mission was also E. Quient, who notes that he saw, “people so decimated, so scared and with such ravaged country”. The painter Prosper Baccuet, also made many extremely interesting drawings of Navarino, which were not published in the Atlas and remain in the Library of Athens. Upon the arrival of the French military corps under General N.I. Maison (1828), which was decimated by disease, began the life of the new Pylos. From an unknown village outside of Niokastro, it was transformed into the new bright centre of the region. This was the final historical battle, one with sailboats, where old enemies allied and fought an indirect enemy, so that the struggle for liberation of another people could succeed.

After the Greek State was established, Messenia would follow the same historical path as the other regions of Peloponnesus. However, certain events in its capital, Kalamata, sealed the fate of the region, such as the fact that, during the mid-19th century it became an important shipping hub, and a port exporting raisins; there were steam-engine factories and silk mills operating in the city, while in the 1930s it was the seventh largest port in the country in terms of imports. On 28 April 1941 German troops occupied the city.