Kalamata Castle

The castle occupies a hilltop above the point where the Nedon leaves a gorge in Mount Taygetos and turns south across the coastal plain towards the Messenian Gulf. The hill was the acropolis of ancient Pharae, where tradition places a citadel raised by the hero Pharis and the palace of the city's kings, Pharae being counted among the cities that sent men to the Trojan War. Kalamata itself is attested from the tenth century. A Christian church was built over the ancient ruins in the sixth century, and the Byzantines fortified the height again.

By the time the Frankish Crusaders arrived in 1205 the Byzantine castle was in poor condition and had been turned into a monastery, which offered only brief resistance to the conquerors. The Crusaders who founded the Principality of Achaea rebuilt the place heavily, incorporating some parts of the older structure, and what stands today appears to be substantially their thirteenth-century work. It was never modernised as an artillery fortress; the historian Kevin Andrews attributed that to the lack of space and to the castle's eminent, but not pre-eminent, position. It kept instead the features of a typical early medieval castle, with donjon, inner redoubt and outer enclosure.

Kalamata became one of the twelve baronies of the Principality of Achaea and was assigned as the patrimony of the princely family, the Villehardouins. Geoffrey I of Villehardouin made the castle his residence and the seat of the barony of Kalamata, and the repaired fortress became both the centre of the barony and a favourite residence of the family. Prince William II of Villehardouin was born there and died there.

After William's death the castellany of Kalamata passed to his widow, Anna Komnene Doukaina, but its strategic importance meant that it was recovered by the princely domain in 1282.

In 1293 or 1295 the castle was briefly taken by local Slavs from the nearby district of Gianitsa. One of them, held prisoner in the donjon, had used a rope to measure the height of the wall up to his cell window. Once released he built a ladder to that height, and one night he and fifty companions climbed into the tower. The following day, with six hundred more Slavs to help them, they drove the Franks out of the castle. The Slavic occupation was short: the Franks recovered the place with the assistance of a local Greek chieftain, and afterwards raised the height of the walls.

Kalamata then stayed in Frankish hands almost to the end of the Principality of Achaea. The date it passed to the Byzantines is given two ways: 1325, with Mahaut of Hainaut named as the last of the Frankish holders, or 1428, when it was taken by the Byzantines of the Despotate of the Morea.

After the Ottoman conquest of the Morea in 1458 to 1460, Kalamata was held by the Republic of Venice along with several other Moreot fortresses, but was lost during the First Ottoman-Venetian War of 1463 to 1479. In 1659, trying to divert Ottoman attention away from the ongoing siege of Candia, the Venetians under Francesco Morosini raided Kalamata and sacked the castle, though they did not occupy it.

Morosini came back in 1685, at the opening of the Morean War. On 14 September the Venetians defeated an Ottoman army before Kalamata, and the retreating Ottomans set fire to their own ammunition stores, inflicting great damage on the castle. Judging it obsolete in an age of ever evolving siege artillery, the Venetians then dismantled it, and the donjon survives only in part because of those demolitions. During the second period of Venetian rule, which lasted until 1715, they rebuilt at least the outer circuit wall: a Lion of Saint Mark over the main gate and other architectural traces point to work carried out shortly after 1701, apparently including a gate with a redan that replaced one piercing the outer wall directly.

During the eighteenth century the castle lost its military significance and was abandoned. In 1821 it was taken by the Greeks in the revolution, and in 1825 the forces of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt laid siege to it and inflicted further extensive damage.

In the early twentieth century the writer Zacharias Papantoniou, then serving as prefect of Messenia, had the ruins turned into a park. The castle is a protected monument under the auspices of the Messenia Ephorate of Antiquities and is open to visitors, and the enclosure is still used for performances, concerts and other events.