The Peloponnese & Western Greece

The Peloponnese was the heart of Bronze Age Greece. Between about 1600 and 1200 BC the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos ruled the plains around them, and the clay tablets found at Pylos preserve some of the earliest written Greek. In the classical centuries Sparta held the peninsula through its league of allies and its Messenian helots, Corinth grew rich on the portage across the Isthmus, and every four years from, by tradition, 776 BC the Greek world met at Olympia. Thebes ended Spartan power in 371 BC and freed Messenia; Rome razed Corinth in 146 BC, and after winning the sea battle of Actium off the Acarnanian coast in 31 BC Octavian refounded Patras as a Roman colony.

After the Fourth Crusade of 1204 French knights made the peninsula the Principality of Achaea, governed from Andravida and guarded by castles such as Chlemoutsi. The Byzantines returned in 1262, and their Despotate of the Morea, ruled from Mystras above Sparta, became the last centre of Byzantine art and learning. The Ottomans took the Morea in 1460, while Venice clung to Methoni, Koroni, Nafplio and Monemvasia and came back to rule the whole peninsula from 1687 to 1715. The Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet off Lepanto, today's Nafpaktos, in 1571.

The revolution of 1821 began here. The Maniots rose at Areopoli on 17 March, Kalamata fell six days later, and Kolokotronis took Tripoli later that year. Byron died at Messolonghi in April 1824, and the town's starving defenders broke out through the Ottoman lines in April 1826; an allied fleet sank the Ottoman-Egyptian navy in Navarino Bay in October 1827, and Nafplio was the capital of the new state until the court moved to Athens in 1834. German troops shot the men of Kalavryta on 13 December 1943, and the Rio–Antirrio bridge joined the two halves of the region in 2004.

The Moraites, as the people of the Peloponnese are known, hold a particular place in the national story. The strongest local identity is that of the Mani, whose clans were never effectively governed by the Ottomans, built tower-houses to fight one another, and kept the vendetta into the late 19th century. On the Arcadian coast around Leonidio a dwindling number of mostly elderly people speak Tsakonian, the only living descendant of ancient Doric Greek, and the town sends paper hot-air balloons into the sky at Easter.

Patras stages Greece's biggest carnival, which opens on 17 January and climaxes on the last weekend before Lent with a parade of floats and costumed groups and the burning of the Carnival King at the harbour. The city's patron is St Andrew, by tradition crucified here, whose skull is kept in the huge basilica by the sea. Kalamata gave its name to the kalamatianos, the twelve-step circle dance performed at every Greek wedding, and holds an international dance festival.

Antiquity is kept in use rather than merely preserved. The flame for every Olympic Games is lit from the sun's rays with a parabolic mirror in front of the Temple of Hera at Olympia, ancient drama is played at Epidaurus on summer weekends, and the 246-kilometre Spartathlon ends each September at the statue of Leonidas in Sparta. Messolonghi, officially a "sacred city", commemorates the Exodus of 1826 each spring with a procession to the Garden of Heroes. Elsewhere the year turns on the village panigyri, the saint's-day feast of clarinet bands, roast meat and dancing, which peaks around 15 August, when the emigrants come home.

About 1.2 million people live in the two administrative regions — roughly 540,000 in the Peloponnese and 650,000 in Western Greece. Patras, with some 215,000 in its municipality, is Greece's third city and its western gateway, a port and university town of arcaded streets; Kalamata, with about 70,000 in the municipality, Agrinio, Corinth, Tripoli, Pyrgos, Argos and Sparta are the other centres, and Nafplio, for all its fame, has only about 14,000 residents. The mountain interior of Arcadia and the inner Mani have been losing people for more than a century, first to America and Australia and then to Athens, and many stone villages are full only in August.

The economy is agricultural to a degree unusual in the European Union: olives and oil in Messenia and Laconia, oranges on the plains of Argos and Sparta, currants along the Gulf of Corinth, wine at Nemea, strawberries in Elis — picked largely by migrant workers — and fish farms in the Messolonghi lagoon. Agrinio, once Greece's tobacco capital, has had to reinvent itself since the tobacco industry declined, and the lignite that has fed the Megalopoli power station since 1969 is running out. Patras lives on its university and its port, with ferries to Italy; tourism is concentrated in Nafplio, Olympia, the Mani and the Messenian coast.

Provincial hours hold: shops shut from about two until half past five, the afternoon is quiet, and the evening volta fills Nafplio's marble-paved Syntagma Square and the waterfront at Kalamata. Athenians arrive on Friday evenings now that motorways have put Nafplio and Kalamata within two to three hours of the capital, and the olive harvest, from November to January, still brings families back to their villages.

This is olive country. The dark, almond-shaped Kalamata table olive and the oil pressed from the Koroneiki olive are the region's best-known exports, and most cooking starts from them. The Mani adds syglino, salted and smoked pork preserved in its own fat, and lalangia, strips of fried dough eaten with cheese. Hilopites egg noodles and trahanas are mountain staples, and sfela, a semi-hard white cheese in brine protected since 1996, belongs to the south.

Leonidio holds a summer festival for its aubergines, Argolis grows oranges, and Aigio has shipped currants since the 19th century. At Messolonghi the lagoon gives avgotaraho, grey-mullet roe salted, dried and sealed in beeswax. Sweets include diples, folds of fried pastry drenched in honey and walnuts and served at weddings, and Kalamata's pasteli sesame-and-honey bars.

The wines are among Greece's most important. Nemea, the country's most important red-wine appellation, grows Agiorgitiko; the Mantinia plateau near Tripoli makes aromatic white Moschofilero; Patras has dry Roditis, Muscat and the sweet fortified Mavrodaphne, first made by the Bavarian Gustav Clauss, whose Achaia Clauss winery of 1861 still receives visitors; and Monemvasia gave its name to Malvasia, the sweet "Malmsey" of medieval trade. Patras' own digestif is tentura, a dark liqueur of cinnamon and cloves.

The north-east corner is the most densely packed. Nafplio, a Venetian and neoclassical harbour town, lies beneath the fortress of Palamidi, with the Bourtzi fort on its islet in the bay. Within 30 kilometres are Mycenae, with the Lion Gate, the grave circles and the beehive Treasury of Atreus, the Cyclopean walls of Tiryns, and Epidaurus, whose 4th-century-BC theatre seats about 14,000 and carries a whisper to the top row. Ancient Corinth, the fortress-mountain of Acrocorinth and the 6-kilometre Corinth Canal lie on the way from Athens.

In Laconia the ruined Byzantine city of Mystras climbs a spur of Taygetos above Sparta, and Monemvasia, a walled town on the seaward face of a huge rock joined to the coast by a causeway, is still lived in. South of Gythio the Mani towers begin — clan tower-houses at Vathia and Areopoli — along with the Diros caves, toured by boat, and Cape Tainaro, the southern tip of mainland Greece. Messenia has the walls and stadium of ancient Messene, Navarino Bay with the horseshoe beach of Voidokilia and Nestor's palace, and the Venetian sea-castles of Methoni and Koroni. In Arcadia the stone villages of Dimitsana and Stemnitsa overlook the monasteries of the Lousios gorge, and the temple of Apollo at Bassae stands alone at 1,100 metres beneath a protective tent.

Olympia, in the west, keeps the stadium track, the fallen columns of the Temple of Zeus and a museum with the Hermes of Praxiteles. Patras has its castle, Roman odeon and the Rio–Antirrio bridge; the rack railway climbs from Diakopto through the Vouraikos gorge to Kalavryta, near the Cave of the Lakes and the Chelmos ski slopes; and the pine forest and dunes of Strofylia back the long beach at Kalogria. Across the gulf, Messolonghi has the Garden of Heroes and its lagoon, Nafpaktos a tiny Venetian harbour below its castle, and Trichonida is the largest natural lake in Greece.