Mystras

On a steep spur of Mount Taygetos, five kilometres from Sparta, a ruined city climbs a hillside in terraces: a castle at the top, a palace complex below it, monasteries and churches scattered down the slope, and the remains of houses, cisterns, streets and gates filling the spaces between. Mystras was inhabited for about six hundred years and abandoned in the nineteenth century, and it is the only Byzantine city that can be walked through as a city rather than as a handful of surviving monuments in a modern town.

It is also the place where the last phase of Byzantine civilisation is most visible. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Constantinople was a besieged relic, Mystras was the seat of a functioning Byzantine province, a centre of painting, and the home of the most radical philosopher the empire produced.

Frankish Origins

The castle at the summit was built in 1249 by William II Villehardouin, the Frankish prince of Achaea, as one of a chain of fortresses controlling Laconia after the Fourth Crusade had parcelled out the Byzantine lands.

He held it for exactly ten years. Captured at the battle of Pelagonia in 1259 by the forces of Michael VIII Palaiologos, he bought his freedom in 1262 with three fortresses: Mystras, Monemvasia and Maina. The Byzantines thus acquired, without building it, a defensible strongpoint in the middle of the Frankish Peloponnese.

The population of Sparta, on the open plain below and vulnerable to raiding, moved up to the protection of the castle. A town grew on the slope, walled in stages, and by the fourteenth century Mystras was the largest settlement in Laconia.

The Despotate

From 1349 the Byzantine Peloponnese was governed as a semi-autonomous province by a son or brother of the reigning emperor, holding the title of despot, with Mystras as his capital. The Despotate of the Morea recovered almost the entire peninsula from the Franks over the following century, and it was the only part of the empire that was expanding.

Six of the last emperors’ relatives ruled here. Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, was despot at Mystras from 1428 and was crowned emperor in its cathedral in January 1449 — the only Byzantine coronation ever held outside Constantinople.

The Churches

Mystras has five major surviving churches and several smaller chapels, and between them they cover a century and a half of late Byzantine painting.

The Metropolis (St Demetrios), begun about 1270, is the oldest. It is a basilica at ground level with a cross-in-square upper storey — the compromise plan described in Byzantine church architecture, achieved here by inserting galleries and rebuilding the roof in the fifteenth century. A marble slab in the floor carries a carved double-headed eagle, traditionally identified as the spot where Constantine XI was crowned. Its frescoes span the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Brontochion monastery contains two churches: Sts Theodore, a domed octagon of the 1290s, and the Hodegetria or Aphentiko of about 1310, which is the finest building on the site. The Aphentiko’s frescoes — particularly the miracle scenes in the narthex chapels — are among the best Palaiologan work outside the Chora, with crowded architectural settings, deep landscapes and figures that move.

The Peribleptos, built into the rock in the mid-fourteenth century, has the most complete fresco cycle at Mystras: a full programme with the Divine Liturgy in the sanctuary, the twelve feasts, and a Dormition on the west wall. The blues are unusually well preserved.

The Pantanassa, consecrated in 1428 and the last major Byzantine church built anywhere, combines a Byzantine plan with a gothic-influenced exterior gallery and bell tower — direct evidence of a century of Frankish neighbours. Its frescoes are the latest in the Byzantine tradition and show a decorative, almost florid manner.

The style across these buildings is treated more fully in Byzantine frescoes.

The Palace

The palace complex on the middle terrace is one of the very few Byzantine secular buildings of any scale to survive above foundation level. It was built in stages from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century and includes a great hall roughly thirty-six metres long with a throne niche, arched windows and a chimney system, alongside earlier and smaller residential ranges.

It was heavily restored between 2009 and 2019, a project that attracted criticism for the amount of new fabric introduced. Restored or not, it is the best surviving indication of how a late Byzantine ruling household actually lived, and it is worth spending time in for that reason alone.

Plethon

George Gemistos, who called himself Plethon, taught at Mystras from about 1410 until his death in 1452 at an advanced age. He was a Platonist of an extreme kind, and in his final work, the Nomoi (Laws), he proposed replacing Christianity with a reconstructed Hellenic polytheism, complete with a calendar, a liturgy and a philosophical theology derived from Plato and Zoroaster.

He also wrote memoranda to the emperor and the despot proposing a radical reform of the Morea: a national army of Greek soldiers rather than mercenaries, a simplified tax system, state control of trade, and — remarkably for the period — the explicit assertion that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese were Hellenes.

Plethon went to Italy with the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Florence in 1438–1439 and lectured there on the differences between Plato and Aristotle. The impression he made contributed directly to Cosimo de’ Medici’s founding of a Platonic academy in Florence and to the Renaissance revival of Plato, as the transmission of classical learning describes.

His pupil Bessarion became a cardinal of the Roman church. After Plethon’s death, the Nomoi was burned by the patriarch Gennadios Scholarios, who nonetheless preserved a summary of its contents in order to refute it — which is how we know what was in it. In 1464 the Italian condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, campaigning in the Morea, removed Plethon’s remains to Rimini and interred them in the Tempio Malatestiano, where they are.

The End

The Morea fell to the Ottomans in 1460. Mystras continued as a provincial town under Ottoman and briefly Venetian rule, with a silk industry of some importance, and was still inhabited in the early nineteenth century.

It was destroyed in the Greek war of independence and then finally emptied by an administrative decision: in 1834 King Otto ordered the refoundation of Sparta on the ancient site in the plain, and the population moved down the hill. Only the Pantanassa monastery remained occupied, as it still is by a few nuns.

Visiting

Mystras is a UNESCO world heritage site with two entrances, upper and lower. The practical advice, repeated by everyone who has done it the other way, is to enter at the top gate, walk down through the castle, palace and upper town, and leave by the lower gate — the hill is steep and the ascent in summer heat is punishing.

Allow three to four hours. The Peribleptos and the Pantanassa are at opposite ends of the site; the Aphentiko is in the middle and is the one not to miss. Photography inside the churches is generally restricted, and the frescoes reward standing still in the dark for a few minutes until the eyes adjust — a condition the painters assumed.

The Painted Churches in Sequence

Mystras’s five churches can be read as a chronological series, which is what makes the site so useful for the history of late Byzantine painting.

Church	Built	Frescoes
Metropolis (St Demetrios)	c. 1270s, altered 15th c.	Late 13th–14th c., several campaigns
Sts Theodore	c. 1290–1295	Fragmentary, late 13th c.
Hodegetria (Aphentiko)	c. 1310	c. 1310–1320, the best on the site
Peribleptos	mid-14th c.	c. 1350–1375, the most complete cycle
Pantanassa	consecrated 1428	c. 1430s, the last major Byzantine cycle

Walking them in that order is a compressed course in the Palaiologan style: the crowded narrative and confident architectural settings of the Aphentiko, the darker and more monumental Peribleptos with its complete liturgical programme, and the decorative, almost restless Pantanassa work of the 1430s, where the figures are elongated and the settings have become elaborate stage architecture.

The Aphentiko’s narthex chapels are the pieces most often singled out, particularly the miracle scenes, where crowds of secondary figures react to the event with individual gestures and expressions.

The Restoration Argument

The rebuilding of the Palace of the Despots between 2009 and 2019 was the largest intervention at Mystras in a century and was contested throughout.

The work reroofed the great hall, rebuilt collapsed walls and floors, reinstated window tracery and installed services, converting a stabilised ruin into an enclosed building usable for exhibitions.

The case for it: the structure was deteriorating, the roofless masonry was taking water, and a building that can be entered communicates late Byzantine secular life in a way a ruin cannot.

The case against, made by Greek and international conservation bodies: the quantity of new fabric exceeds what the evidence supports, particularly in the upper storeys and the roof profile; the distinction between original and reconstruction is not always legible; and the result is a hypothesis presented as a building.

Both positions are reasonable, and the debate is the standard one in heritage conservation — whether the obligation is to preserve the evidence or to communicate the original. What is not in dispute is that the palace is now the most complete Byzantine secular building anywhere, and that a visitor should know how much of it is modern.

What Mystras Is For

The site’s particular value is that it is a town, not a monument.

Elsewhere in the Byzantine world, the churches survive and the city around them has been rebuilt twenty times. At Mystras the churches, the palace, the fortifications, the houses, the streets, the cisterns, the gates and the relationship between all of them are present at once, because the population walked down the hill to the new Sparta in the 1830s and nobody built on the site afterwards.

That makes it possible to ask questions that cannot be asked in Istanbul or Thessalonica: how far the aristocratic mansions stood from the palace, how the monasteries related to the residential quarters, where the water came from, how the defences were layered, and what it took to supply a hillside town of several thousand people.

Anyone interested in Byzantine urban life rather than Byzantine art should spend their time at Mystras among the houses rather than in the churches.

• The Despotate of the Morea — the province Mystras governed
• Byzantine Frescoes — the painting tradition at its last peak
• The Palaiologan Dynasty — the empire’s last two centuries
• Constantine XI Palaiologos — despot here before he was emperor
• Byzantine Church Architecture — the Mystras hybrid plan
• Bessarion and the Greek Scholars of Italy — Plethon’s pupil and his legacy
• Byzantine Legacy in Greece — what survives of Byzantine Greece