Larissa Fortress

Strabo attributed the name Larisa to a group of Pelasgians who once held the rock above Argos, fortified and used without a break for nineteen centuries as the city's acropolis. In Mycenaean times the principal settlement and temple stood on the neighbouring hill of Aspis, its main cemetery on the col of Deiras between the two heights; Dorian settlers who occupied Larisa's eastern slope became the nucleus of Classical Argos.

Around 421 BC, with a Spartan invasion feared, the Argives pressed unskilled men, women and slaves into building long walls to Nauplion on the Athenian pattern. The walls stood only half finished when King Agis II of Sparta attacked; his men pulled down everything that had been raised.

By 272 BC the city had been re-walled, with gates at each point of the compass, when Pyrrhus of Epirus attacked. He and his men were trapped inside after the gate they meant to retreat through was blocked by the corpse of a slain war elephant, and Pyrrhus was killed in the fighting that followed.

In the following century Argos was contested between pro- and anti-Roman factions. Philip V of Macedon ceded the city to Nabis of Sparta, who garrisoned both Larisa and Aspis and sent much of the aristocracy into exile. After Philip's defeat at Cynoscephalae, the Roman commander Titus Quinctius Flamininus marched on Argos in support of the Achaean League; when the Argives did not rise against Nabis he turned south against Sparta instead, a move that eventually forced Nabis to give up the city. Rome occupied both citadels, but Flamininus withdrew his troops in 194 BC. Larisa fell to the Ostrogoths under Alaric I in 395, who sold many of its people into slavery, and to a Slavic incursion in 600.

The Byzantines raised a new castle on the summit in the 12th century. In 1212 the Crusader Geoffrey of Villehardouin captured it; it was then surrendered to Otto de la Roche, Duke of Athens, in exchange for military assistance, and Larisa became one of the chief strongholds of the Lordship of Argos and Nauplia. Its foundations were repaired in the 14th century, and under the bailiffs Walter and Francis Foucherolles it held fast despite the depredations of the Catalan Company, which had already conquered the Duchy of Athens and was threatening the Argolid as well.

In 1388 the last heiress, Maria of Enghien, sold Argos and Nauplia to Venice. Before Venice could take possession, the Despot of the Morea, Theodore I Palaiologos, seized both towns with Ottoman military help under Evrenos; the Venetians quickly recovered Nauplia, but Theodore held Argos for six years. In 1393 the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I forced Theodore to cede Argos and Monemvasia; Theodore later recovered Monemvasia but agreed to sell Argos to Venice, which occupied it on 11 June 1394. A year later, Ottoman troops fresh from their victory over a Crusader army at Nicopolis sacked the town before withdrawing.

Argos and Larisa remained Venetian until the Ottomans overran them at the outbreak of the First Ottoman–Venetian War in 1463. In 1821 the fortress was captured by Demetrios Ypsilantis during the Greek War of Independence; it played little further part in the fighting that followed.

A nunnery had already been built on the slopes in the 18th century, and a monastery for monks, now a church, followed in the 19th. During the War of Independence the monastery briefly served as a national mint striking coins for the provisional government, before the operation moved to Aegina. The site is today protected as an archaeological site and a protected building within the Argos-Mykines municipality; the ruins of the Byzantine-Venetian castle crown the summit, with the monasteries of Panagia Katakekrymeni-Portokalousa and Agia Marina on the slopes below.