Pylos

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pylos is a small harbor town on the southwestern tip of Greece's Peloponnese peninsula. In Homer's Odyssey, the young Telemachus recalls arriving here and being welcomed by King Nestor. Telemachus says Nestor 'received me in his lofty house and gave me kindly welcome, as a father might his own son.' Homer was describing a real Bronze Age kingdom, one whose name outlasted the kingdom itself and still marks this coast today. Between Nestor's era and the present, this same stretch of coastline has been fought over by Spartans, Franks, Venetians, Ottomans, Egyptians, Russians and the French. Its name shifted with each new set of rulers, only to return, eventually, to the one Homer used. What was actually here when Nestor supposedly ruled, and what does the archaeology beneath this harbor really show? Why did so many empires want this particular strip of coast, and what happened to the name Pylos while they fought over it?

• 2. Nestor's Homeric Kingdom

  ›

  Between roughly 1600 and 1200 BC, a Mycenaean kingdom governed from Pylos covered an area of about 2,000 square kilometers. Linear B records from the site imply a minimum population of 50,000 people, with some scholarly estimates running as high as 80,000-120,000. The city Homer described was never a single fixed point on a map. Archaeologists have identified other Mycenaean sites nearby that appear to have been folded into Pylos's territory, including palaces at Nichoria and Iklaina and a village called Malthi. The clearest anchor for the kingdom's capital is a hill called Ano Englianos, about 9 kilometers northeast of the modern town's bay, near the village of Chora.

  In 1939, American archaeologist Carl Blegen and Greek archaeologist Konstantinos Kourouniotis began digging what is now known as the Palace of Nestor. Their excavation paused for the Second World War, then resumed under Blegen alone in 1952 and continued until 1966. Blegen's team uncovered a throne room with its own foyer and anteroom, storage warehouses, private baths, and walls once covered in frescoes influenced by Minoan art. Ninety meters outside the palace, they also found a beehive-shaped tholos tomb, later restored in 1957 and now known as Tholos tomb IV.

  Alongside the architecture, Blegen recovered thousands of clay tablets, 1,087 fragments in total, the largest cache of the Linear B script found anywhere in Greece. In 1952, self-taught linguist Michael Ventris, working with John Chadwick, deciphered Linear B and identified it as the earliest known written form of Greek. The tablets were mostly administrative, recording transactions rather than stories, but they confirmed that the Bronze Age residents of this hill already called their home Pylos, spelled pu-ro in the script. Unlike other Mycenaean palaces, Pylos had no walls or fortifications at all. Around 1180 BC it burned to the ground, and the tablets that survived, hardened by that same fire, describe hurried defenses against an attack the writers never named. The site was then abandoned through what is often called the Greek Dark Ages, between 1100 and 800 BC, and the region was later enslaved by neighboring Sparta.

• 3. The Griffin Warrior's Tomb

  ›

  In 2015, American archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack L. Davis, working under the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, found an undisturbed shaft tomb near Tholos tomb IV. The grave held the skeleton of a man between 30 and 35 years old, about 1.70 meters tall, buried in the Late Helladic IIA period, sometime between 1600 and 1470 BC. Researchers named him the Griffin Warrior after a mythological creature, part eagle and part lion, engraved on an ivory plaque found beside him.

  His grave also contained armor, weapons, a mirror, and gold jewelry, including several gold signet rings researchers describe as exceptionally crafted. Some archaeologists believe the burial belongs to a Wanax, a tribal king, lord, or military leader of the Mycenaean era. Among the grave goods was the Pylos Combat Agate, a seal carved from agate around 1450 BC, showing a warrior locked in hand-to-hand combat.

  Two years later, in 2017, the same team found two more tholos tombs nearby, numbered Tholos tombs VI and VII. Both domes had collapsed long ago, but the tombs were still littered with flakes of gold leaf that had once covered the walls. Among the recovered artifacts was a gold pendant shaped like the head of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, offering the first evidence that Pylos had traded with Egypt and the Middle East, around 1500 BC. In June 2016, the Palace of Nestor site itself reopened to visitors after three years of construction, replacing a 1960s-era roof with a modern structure of elevated walkways.

• 4. A Name Erased and Restored

  ›

  Pylos kept its ancient name into the Byzantine period, but after the Frankish conquest of the early 13th century, two new names took over. One was French: Port-de-Jonc, meaning Rush Harbour, with local variants such as the Italian Porto-Junco or Zunchio, the Catalan Port Jonc, and the Latin Iuncum, all referring to the marshes surrounding the site. The other was Greek: Avarinos, later shortened to Varinos or lengthened to Anavarinos, which became Navarino in Italian and Navarin in French.

  Where that Greek name actually came from is still disputed. An early 15th-century traveller named Nompar de Caumont blamed it on the Navarrese Company, a theory later repeated by the 19th-century historian Karl Hopf, even though the name was already in use before the Navarrese ever arrived in Greece. In 1830, the scholar Fallmereyer proposed instead that a group of Avars had settled there, an idea the historian William Miller later adopted. Modern scholars lean toward a different answer: a Slavic name meaning 'place of maples.' Avarinos and Navarino existed alongside Port-de-Jonc for generations, but only overtook it in the 15th century, after the Frankish Principality of Achaea collapsed.

  In the late 14th or early 15th century, while the Navarrese Company held the site, it briefly picked up two more names: Chateau Navarres, and Spanochori, meaning 'village of the Spaniards,' used by local Greeks. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted from 1498 to 1685 and again from 1715 to 1821, the Turkish name became Anavarin. After the Ottomans built a new fortress there in 1571 or 1572, local Greeks started calling that fortress Neokastro, 'new castle,' while the older Frankish castle became Palaiokastro, 'old castle.' The name Pylos itself did not return until 1833, when King Otto I revived it by royal decree, in a deliberate nod to the ancient king Nestor.

• 5. The Battle of Pylos

  ›

  During the Second Messenian War, Pylos held out longer than almost anywhere else against Spartan attack, until its remaining people emigrated, first to Cyllene, then with other Messenians to Sicily. Centuries later, the historian Thucydides described the same district as 'together with most of the country round, unpopulated.' The ancient city itself did not sit where the modern town of Pylos stands today; it stood north of the island of Sphacteria.

  In 425 BC, the Athenian politician Cleon sent an expedition that fortified the rocky promontory known as Koryphasion, at the northern edge of Navarino Bay, near what is now the Gialova Lagoon. After clashing with Spartan ships in what became known as the Battle of Pylos, the Athenians seized and held the bay. The Athenian commander Demosthenes finished the fort the following year, in 424 BC.

  Thucydides left a detailed account of the harbor's shape: the island of Sphacteria ran along the coast, leaving only two narrow entrances, one to the north just wide enough for two triremes side by side, and one to the south wide enough for eight or nine. He describes Sphacteria itself as about 15 stadia wide, wooded, and uninhabited. The geographer Pausanias later compared it to the island of Rheneia sitting before the harbor of Delos. Soon after fortifying the bay, the Athenians trapped and captured a force of Spartan troops on Sphacteria, in what is now called the Battle of Sphacteria. The prisoners were taken to Athens as hostages, and Spartan anxiety over getting them back helped push Sparta to accept the Peace of Nicias in 421 BC.

• 6. Empires Take the Fortress

  ›

  Little is recorded about Pylos under Byzantine rule beyond a mention of raids by Cretan Saracens around 872 or 873. In the 12th century, the Muslim geographer al-Idrisi described it as a 'commodious port' in his writing on world geography. Everything changed after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when the Peloponnese became the Crusader state known as the Principality of Achaea. Pylos fell quickly to the new rulers, but sources go quiet again until the 1280s, when Nicholas II of Saint Omer, lord of Thebes, is credited with building a castle at Navarino, on land he had gained in exchange for his wife's holdings at Kalamata and Chlemoutsi.

  The fortress stayed relatively unimportant for decades, apart from a naval battle fought there in 1354 between Venice and Genoa. A more dramatic episode unfolded in 1364, when Mary of Bourbon, who had been granted Navarino along with Kalamata and Mani back in 1358, clashed with Prince Philip of Taranto over control of the principality. Mary's castellan briefly imprisoned the new prince's representative, a man named Simon del Poggio. Mary held onto Navarino until her death in 1377. Afterward, Albanians settled the area, and by 1381 or 1382, Navarrese, Gascon and Italian mercenaries were active there too.

  By the early 15th century, Venice wanted Navarino for itself, worried that rival Genoese forces might seize it and threaten Venetian outposts at Modon and Coron. The Venetians took the fortress in 1417 and made their hold official in 1423, the same year Navarino suffered its first Ottoman raid, led by Turakhan Bey. A second raid followed in 1452. In between, Navarino briefly appeared on the world stage: Emperor John VIII Palaiologos set sail from there in 1437, bound for the Council of Ferrara, and the last Despot of the Morea, Thomas Palaiologos, embarked from the same port with his family in 1460, fleeing the Ottoman conquest of his territory.

  Venetian control survived one war with the Ottomans, between 1463 and 1479, but not the next one. In August 1500, after the Venetian defeat at the Battle of Modon, a 3,000-strong garrison at Navarino surrendered, even though it was well stocked for a siege. The Venetians briefly recaptured the fort on the 3rd or the 4th of December, only for a joint Ottoman land and sea assault, led by Kemal Reis and Hadim Ali Pasha, to retake it on the 20th of May 1501. The Ottomans then used Navarino as a naval base for both piracy and larger fleet campaigns across the Ionian and Adriatic seas.

  The Venetians returned once more in 1685, during the Morean War, when commanders Francesco Morosini and Otto Wilhelm Konigsmarck stormed both of Navarino's fortresses. Under Venetian rule, a 1689 census counted 1,413 residents, rising to 1,797 twenty years later. That second Venetian period ended in 1715, when the Ottomans recovered the Peloponnese. Decades later, on the 10th of April 1770, the fortress fell again, this time to Russian forces during the Orlov Revolt, after a six-day siege. The Ottoman garrison was allowed to leave for Crete while the Russians repaired the fort. But on the 1st of June, the Russians withdrew, the Ottomans burned and partly demolished what they retook, and Albanian mercenaries serving the Ottomans killed most of the local population who had fled to the island of Sphacteria.

• 7. The Battle of Navarino

  ›

  After the Greek War of Independence broke out against Ottoman rule in mid-March 1821, Greek forces won a string of early victories and declared independence on the 1st of January 1822. Local Greeks besieged Navarino starting on the 29th of March 1821. The garrison, reinforced by Muslim residents from nearby Kyparissia, held out until the first week of August, when it was finally forced to surrender. Despite promises of safe passage, the Greeks massacred the entire garrison.

  Greek success did not last. The Ottoman Sultan called on his Egyptian vassal Muhammad Ali for help, and Muhammad Ali sent his son, Ibrahim Pasha, to Greece with a fleet and 8,000 men, later reinforced by another 25,000 troops. Ibrahim's campaign proved decisive. The region of Pylos fell to his forces on the 18th of May 1825, following the battles of Sphacteria on the 8th of May and Neokastro on the 11th of May. Much of the Peloponnese was reconquered that same year. Messolonghi fell in 1826, and Athens in 1827. By then, Greek nationalists held only scattered pockets: Nafplion, Mani, Hydra, Spetses and Aegina.

  Ibrahim's campaign helped ignite a wave of philhellenism across Western Europe, especially after the poet Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824. Writers and artists including Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alexander Pushkin, Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz and Eugene Delacroix took up the Greek cause in their work, with Delacroix painting both Scenes of the Massacres of Scio in 1824 and Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi in 1826. By the Treaty of London in July 1827, France, Russia and Britain recognized Greek autonomy, while keeping Greece a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. The three powers agreed to a show of force meant to pressure the Ottoman government into accepting the treaty's terms.

  A combined fleet of 27 allied warships sailed for Navarino: twelve British ships carrying 456 guns, seven French ships with 352 guns, and eight Russian ships with 490 guns, for a combined firepower of nearly 1,300 guns. On the 20th of October 1827, the resulting Battle of Navarino destroyed the combined Ottoman-Egyptian fleet almost completely, sinking or wrecking around 60 warships. An obelisk memorializing the three Allied admirals, Britain's Edward Codrington, France's Henri de Rigny and Russia's Lodewijk van Heiden, was later raised on the town's central square. Sculptor Thomas Thomopoulos built the monument, which was unveiled in 1930 though not finished until 1933.

• 8. Building Modern Pylos

  ›

  On the 6th of October 1828, French troops under Marshal Nicolas-Joseph Maison finally drove Ibrahim Pasha's Ottoman-Egyptian forces out of Pylos for good. Maison commanded an expeditionary corps of 15,000 men, sent by King Charles X of France between 1828 and 1833 to enforce the Treaty of London. Within the same month, French troops also liberated Modon, Koroni and Patras. Starting in the spring of 1829, an entirely new town rose outside the walls of Neokastro, modeled on the bastides of Southwest France and the towns of the Ionian Islands, with a central square framed by arcaded galleries. Lieutenant-colonel Joseph-Victor Audoy, an engineer from the Tarn region of France, designed the street plan. Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias approved Audoy's design on the 15th of January 1831, making it only the second urban plan adopted in the newly independent Greek state, after Methoni's.

  French engineers also built a barracks, known today as the Maison building, which now houses the Archaeological Museum of Pylos. They installed schools, a hospital, a church, a postal service, shops, bridges, squares, fountains and gardens, and restored the old Ottoman aqueduct, which had lain in ruins since 1828 and went on serving the town until 1907. They also built the road linking Navarino to Modon, the first road constructed in independent Greece and one still in use today. Nineteen scientists attached to the expedition, known as the Morea Scientific Mission, carried out work that shaped the young Greek state's archaeology, cartography and natural sciences. A census taken during the mission, in 1829, counted 1,596 residents in the province of Navarino.

  Some French merchants and officers stayed behind after the rest of the troops sailed home in 1833, settling in a district north of the city near a Catholic church that no longer stands. Locals still call that neighborhood Francomahalas or Francoklisa. French writers took a particular interest in the town during this period; Edgar Quinet wrote about Pylos in 1830, and Alphonse de Lamartine did the same in 1832.

  The town sits at the foot of a promontory extending from Mount Aghios Nikolaos, 482 meters high, with the island of Sphacteria acting as a natural breakwater across Navarino Bay. Near the modern port stands the house of Kostis Tsiklitiras, an Olympic champion who won a silver medal in the standing long jump and a silver in the standing high jump at the 1908 London Games, then a gold in the standing long jump and a bronze in the standing high jump at the 1912 Stockholm Games. His former home is now a museum holding a collection gathered by the French philhellene Rene Puaux. Antonis Samaras, later Prime Minister of Greece between 2012 and 2015, has served as an MP for the region since 1977.

  The fortress later served a darker purpose: between 1936 and 1941, during the Metaxas dictatorship, it held political prisoners. Administratively, Pylos was the seat of its own municipality from 1912 to 1946, then of a larger Deme of Pylos from 1946 to 2010, and since the 2011 local government reform it has anchored the municipality of Pylos-Nestor, with 17,194 residents as of the 2021 census. In 2025, the town hosted the 144th Session of the International Olympic Committee, where delegates elected Kirsty Coventry as the IOC's new president. On the night of the 14th of June 2023, a vessel carrying an estimated 400-750 migrants and refugees had capsized off that same coast, allegedly after the Greek coastguard tried to pull it into the Italian maritime search and rescue zone. More than 500 people were presumed dead, a tragedy on the same waters where, two centuries earlier, allied admirals had fought to help settle the fate of a nation still finding its name.