The Ever-Presence of Mythology on Greece's Peloponnese Peninsula

09.05.2024 - 14:51 / cntraveler.com

I am looking for the gates to Hades, but have overshot the turn. Somewhere below is the cave from which Heracles dragged the fearsome three-headed dog Cerberus into daylight so bright its slobber formed yellow flowers of aconite. Instead, I find a beach of pale rock and water that's glass-calm to the horizon. Beneath its surface are hundreds of curled little fish with flanks of tarnished silver.

The family-run Kyrimai Hotel in the village of Gerolimenas

On the water during the annual Spetses Classic Yacht Regatta

I'm in mountainous Southern Greece, midway through an epic road trip across the Peloponnese, the four-tentacled peninsula connected to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth and surrounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, and the Aegean to the east. This storied peninsula contains traces of classical, Venetian, Byzantine, and Turkish rule. Modern European history springs from the Peloponnese. It is home to Sparta and Olympia, names that sound so like myths of antiquity you might forget they're actual places. There are towns such as Kardamyli, so lovely that Agamemnon offered it to sulky Achilles to lure him out of bed to fight the Trojan War. In deepest Mani, the longest of the peninsula's tentacles—one of the last wild parts of Europe, a place that turned back even the Ottomans—the cliffs and gorges seem to be made of shadows, and empty stone villages rupture the sky like mausoleums.

Stuffed and grilled sardines at the Kyrimai Hotel

The entrance to Porto Heli PK villa

I started at Porto Heli, a resort town in a bay in the Argolic Gulf. Tall villas as creamy as squill spike the cliffs, and there's a modern marina full of boats dotted with drying swimsuits and hungover yachters reading newspapers. From here to the island of Spetses it's an irresistible five minutes in a water taxi. Famed for its occupants' shipbuilding and naval skills, this territory, especially the islands of Hydra and Spetses, played a crucial role in overcoming nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule, and there are reminders everywhere of the Revolution of 1821 along this eastern rim of the Peloponnese. I'm in time for the annual regatta, catching a lift with a group of sailors who are preparing to unfurl a vast revolutionary flag on a sail for one of the races.

Colorful bougainvillea

A rental villa in the resort town of Porto Heli

Later, when I'm on Spetses and wandering past its lovely neoclassical houses and old mariners' mansions, the first wind in weeks picks up, and even the cicadas seem to dig themselves out of the oleander and languid weeds. I hear billows of conversation from restaurants, some with tables set on pebbles inches from the water. Diners raise drams of Greek brandy over plates of