Nafplio: The City That Invented Greek Nostalgia

Nafplio is the city that Athenians go to when they need to remember why they stayed in Greece. It is three hours from Athens by road, positioned at the inner end of the Argolic Gulf in the northeastern Peloponnese, and it is so comprehensively, almost aggressively beautiful that spending more than two days there induces a specific form of melancholy: the knowledge that your own city is not this.

The old town is Venetian in form — a grid of narrow streets, tall ochre buildings, arched doorways, small churches — laid over and around a Byzantine foundation. It served as the capital of the first Greek state from 1828 to 1834, which gives it a particular historical charge: the neoclassical mansions of the independence era stand alongside the Venetian churches and the older mosque in the square (now a cinema, then a mosque, earlier a church) in a layered chronology that the city wears without self-consciousness.

The three fortresses define the skyline. The Akronauplia, the oldest, sits directly above the old town and has been fortified in one form or another since antiquity. The Palamidi, above it, is the Venetian masterwork — a dramatic baroque fort reached by 999 steps (the count varies) from which the entire Argolic Gulf is visible on clear days. The Bourtzi, the island fortress in the harbour, was the executioner's residence in the nineteenth century and is now accessible by water taxi.

Eat in the old town, in one of the restaurants that faces the harbour wall. The Argolida produces some of the best olive oil in Greece, the local oranges are world-class, and the fish from the Gulf is fresh in a way that coastal city fish rarely is. Drink ouzo at sunset on the harbour promenade, watching the water change colour. This is exactly what it looks like in the photographs, and the photographs do not exaggerate.