The Lost Villages of Mani: Where Greece Kept Its Secrets

The Mani Peninsula extends south from the Taygetos mountains toward the open Mediterranean, growing more arid and austere with every kilometre. The vegetation thins to thyme, spurge, and wild garlic. The stone turns from grey to a scorched ochre. The villages, when they appear, are composed entirely of towers—tall, narrow fortified houses built by the clan families of the Mani in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as instruments of inter-family warfare. Some villages are essentially abandoned, their tower houses standing empty against the sky like a petrified argument.

The Maniots were the one population of the Greek peninsula who successfully resisted full Ottoman incorporation. Operating under a semi-autonomous system of clan governance, paying tribute but maintaining their language, religion, and customs, they preserved a version of Byzantine Greek culture through the Ottoman centuries in a form largely untouched by outside influence. The churches of the deep Mani contain frescoes from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—provincial Byzantine work, sometimes crude, always emotionally direct—that survive because no one has ever had a reason to restore or disturb them.

The village of Vathia, in the southernmost tip of the peninsula, is the most dramatic example of the tower village form. Twenty or thirty towers, most of them derelict, cluster on a rocky outcrop above the sea. The village has perhaps five permanent residents. Walking through it in the late afternoon, when the shadows of the towers fall across each other and the sea glitters below, is an experience in deliberate anachronism.

The food of the deep Mani is the food of an austere, self-sufficient people: dried figs, pressed olives, cured pork from pigs raised on acorns in the hills, a hard dry cheese aged in cloth. The local olive oil—Koroneiki variety, cold-pressed, with a pronounced peppery finish—is among the finest produced anywhere in Greece. Buy it directly from producers in Areopoli. Take more than you think you need.