Mystras

Mystras is a medieval city built into a Peloponnesian hillside that has been empty for nearly two hundred years. The churches still stand. The palace walls are still standing. The frescoes painted inside the Peribleptos monastery in the mid-14th century — a Byzantine art form that reached its technical zenith here, in this remote provincial capital, at the same moment that Constantinople was entering its final century — are still visible on the walls. The city abandoned in the early 1830s in favor of a new, purpose-built Sparta on the plain below, Mystras survived as a ghost, and the ghost is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The site's history begins with a Frankish castle. In 1249, William II of Villehardouin — Prince of Achaea, one of the Latin rulers who had divided Byzantine Greece among themselves after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 — built a castle on a steep conical hill eight kilometres west of ancient Sparta. The choice of location was military: the hill offered a commanding position over the Eurotas River valley and the passes into the Taygetos Mountains. A town began to grow on the slopes below the castle walls.

William's castle did not remain Frankish for long. In 1262, he was forced to cede it to Michael VIII Palaiologos — the Byzantine emperor who had just retaken Constantinople from the Latins — as a condition of his release from Byzantine captivity following his capture at the Battle of Pelagonia. The Byzantine reconquest of Mystras was the beginning of something unexpected: the slow repopulation and extension of Byzantine political authority in the Peloponnese over the following decades, as the territory around the castle was gradually wrested from the remaining Frankish principalities. By the mid-14th century, the Despotate of Morea — the Byzantine semi-autonomous principality governing the Peloponnese — had made Mystras its capital, and the Palaiologos dynasty's despots were building it into the last major flowering of Byzantine civilization in Greece.

The churches and monasteries built on the hillside during the Despotate period constitute what is generally considered the finest surviving ensemble of Late Byzantine ecclesiastical art anywhere. The Peribleptos monastery, the Pantanassa convent — the only site at Mystras still inhabited, where a small community of nuns remains in residence and receives visitors — the Metropolis of Saint Demetrios: each preserves frescoes from the 14th and 15th centuries painted by artists working in a tradition that was simultaneously refining Byzantine icon-painting into something more spatially dynamic, with deeper landscape settings and more expressive human figures, than anything the Byzantine tradition had produced before.

The intellectual life of Mystras in its last decades is inseparable from George Gemistos Plethon, the philosopher who settled in the city around 1410 and remained there until 1452 — the year before Constantinople fell. Plethon was a neo-Platonist at a moment when Aristotelianism dominated both Byzantine and Latin scholasticism; his project of reviving Platonic philosophy placed him at the centre of the intellectual movement that would connect the Byzantine world to the Italian Renaissance. He attended the Council of Florence in 1438, where his lectures directly inspired Cosimo de' Medici to establish his Platonic Academy in Florence — the institution through which Platonic thought re-entered Western European intellectual life after a thousand years of eclipse. Plethon died at Mystras in 1452; his tomb is in the lower town, marked simply and visited by scholars who understand what he set in motion.

Constantinople fell to Mehmed II in May 1453. Mystras, under Despot Thomas Palaiologos, held out for seven more years. When the city's last despot, Demetrios Palaiologos (Thomas's brother), finally surrendered to Mehmed II in 1460, he was ending the Byzantine political presence in mainland Greece. The city continued under Ottoman and later alternating Venetian and Ottoman rule through the 17th and 18th centuries, but its population shrank progressively. When the Greek War of Independence established the modern Greek state, the new government built a modern Sparta on the ancient plain below. By the early 1830s, Mystras was empty.

The absence of continuous occupation after that point is the principal reason for the site's remarkable survival: the churches were not demolished for building material, the palace walls were not dismantled, the frescoes were not plastered over. The ghost city simply sat on its hillside and weathered.

The site today is organized into upper, middle, and lower towns, each accessible on foot from the main entrance gate. The upper town contains the Frankish-Byzantine castle and the Palace of the Despots — a substantial secular complex with arched halls and window openings that preserve the outline of a late medieval administrative and residential complex. The middle and lower towns contain the major churches and the Pantanassa convent. The circuit between all sections involves significant uphill walking on uneven stone paths; sturdy footwear and water are non-negotiable in summer, when the exposed hillside in July and August can be exhausting. The best strategy is to enter from the upper gate (by taxi or car from Sparta), work downhill through the palace and upper churches, and exit through the lower town — a descent rather than an ascent.

Elsewhere in the Peloponnese: [Palamidi Fortress](/castles/greece/palamidi-fortress), 75 kilometres northeast in Nafplio, is an 18th-century Venetian citadel overlooking the Gulf of Argolis — a fortification of a completely different era and character from Mystras but equally impressive in its hillside position. [Acrocorinth](/castles/greece/acrocorinth), at the northern edge of the Peloponnese 100 kilometres north, was the ancient and medieval acropolis of Corinth, fortified continuously from antiquity through the Ottoman period — the Peloponnese's longest-occupied strategic height.