New Navarino Fortress

The Ottoman hold on this corner of Messenia began with the second campaign of Mehmed II the Conqueror into the Peloponnese. Mystras surrendered on Thursday 29 May 1460, and Vordonia with it; the sultan then took Kastritzi and Gardiki, where the people of Leontari had taken refuge, and after them Agios Georgios and Karytaina, before his army came down into the Kontovounia and the district of Arkadia, the modern Kyparissia, as the historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles has it. Pylia and Navarino were organised for the first time as a kaza of the empire, the kaza of Navarino. At first the Ottomans worked from the older castle above the northern entrance of the bay, which they called Anavarin or Avarna: a Crusader work raised in 1278 by the Flemish knight Nicholas II of Saint Omer for the Principality of Achaea, and useful to its new masters both for corsair raiding and for large fleet operations in the Ionian and the Adriatic.

That anchorage failed them. The north-western arm of the bay, the strait of Sykia or Falsa Bouka, and the harbour beneath the old castle silted up until neither could be used, and the replacement was raised at the southern entrance instead. The Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis, admiral of the Ottoman fleet and known in Turkish as Kılıç Ali Pasha, built it in 1573, two years after the fleets met at Lepanto. Anavarin-i cedid, the new Navarino, closed the southern mouth of the bay opposite the southern tip of Sphacteria and watched the trading sea road running between east and west; taken together with the old castle on Cape Koryphasion it put the whole stretch of water from the island of Proti down to the Messenian Oinousses under observation.

Where the medieval castle belonged to an age of walls, the new one was built for guns. Its ramparts follow the trace italienne: thick enough to absorb cannon fire, low enough to offer a poor mark, sloped so that shot struck them at a glancing angle, and stiffened with heavy bastions. The site divides into a Lower Castle of some eighty stremmata and a smaller Upper Castle above it. Two seaward bastions carried the defence of the water, the western one called the Seventh, slightly older than the fortification around it and covering the entrance to the bay, and the northern one known as Djafer Pasha, or Santa Maura, or Santa Maria, covering the harbour of Pylos. The main gate, the Zematistra or Scalding Gate, opens on the south-east, and an aqueduct begun in the sixteenth century at Palaio Nero, later extended to draw on the Koumbe springs some fifteen kilometres to the north-east, fed the springs inside the walls.

In 1645 the fortress served as the base from which Ottoman forces launched their invasion of Crete, in the opening stages of the long Cretan War against Venice that ran until 1669. The fighting came back to Navarino during that war: the Venetians took the place themselves in the 1650s. In 1668 the fleet gathered in the bay once more, more than two thousand sail by Pouqueville's count, and stood out for Crete. The Ottoman chronicler and traveller Evliya Çelebi passed through Messenia in the same year, following the recruitment being raised among the Muslim population of the district for the final siege of Candia.

Çelebi's account in the Seyahatnâme, his Book of Travels, found Niokastro far more developed than the old castle, and what he set down is a picture of prosperity. The place had a mufti, a naib deputising for the kadi, a serdar over the janissaries, a fortress commander and his garrison, a muhtesib for the markets, an officer answerable for the safety of the roads, an emin supervising the haraç, a town planner, a kethüda for the town and twelve aghas. In his day there was no moat, but there were twelve gates. The bastions of the acropolis carried stone observation posts roofed in lead; thirty-three tile-roofed houses stood inside it, without gardens, and six hundred more in the castle below. The mosque of Murad III was roofed in lead, with stone domes, a cistern and a minaret, and the mosque of Ferhad Agha stood in the market, among arcades of shops, eighty-five in the castle altogether, and beside a medrese, a dervish tekke, a han and a hamam. A slave market operated within the castle, selling captives brought in by corsair ships out of Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli. Outside the town lay the varosi, the quarter of the non-Muslim population, with two hundred houses and their orchards, a han and fifteen shops, inhabited entirely by Greeks.

The Morean War, the sixth of the Venetian-Turkish wars, brought the republic back in force. In 1686 Venice under Francesco Morosini took both fortresses at Navarino, held for the sultan by Mustafa Pasha at the new castle and Djafer Pasha at the old. Morosini pressed the siege close and bombarded Niokastro, and its garrison undertook to surrender if the Venetians could beat the Turkish army hurrying to relieve them. The Venetian field commander, the Swede Otto Wilhelm von Königsmarck, broke that army, and on 6 June 1686 the castle was given up. Some of the defenders would not accept the surrender and blew themselves up by firing a powder magazine.

With the peninsula secured, Navarino became an administrative centre of the new Kingdom of the Morea. The Territorio di Navarin was one of the four provinces into which the district of Methoni was then divided, beside Fanari, Arkadia and Methoni itself. The Corner census of 1689 credited Navarino with 101 inhabitants and the province as a whole with 1,413, a figure that had risen to 1,797 twenty years later. The hexagonal citadel on the highest and most exposed ground of the site was created during this Venetian occupation, ringed by a dry moat outside, six pentagonal bastions and close to sixty guns on the ramparts, with an outer circuit of four cylindrical towers. The mosque within the walls was turned into a Catholic church.

Venice worked at the recovery of a countryside emptied by war and had considerable success in reviving its farming and its trade, but the republic never won the loyalty of most of the population and never made the province secure in military terms. The Ottoman return took a single short campaign between June and September 1715, under the grand vizier Silahdar Damat Ali Pasha. Ahead of it the Venetians destroyed the castle at Neokastro and concentrated every force they had at Methoni for a last resistance that came to nothing.

For the best part of a century the fortress was Ottoman again. Pylia was restored as a kaza, and after the reconquest the Navarino district was written into the empire's defter surveys of the Morea. Between 1789 and 1807 Neokastro was held as the timar of Beyhan Sultan, daughter of Sultan Mustafa III and sister of Selim III the Reformer.

That century was broken once. On 10 April 1770, during the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 and the Russian-inspired Greek rising known as the Orlov revolt, the Russians took the fortress after a six-day siege, at the end of which the Ottoman garrison was allowed to evacuate to Crete. Count Alexey Grigoryevich Orlov, admiral of the tsar's fleet, and his brother Fyodor were the decisive figures in it. Russian possession lasted weeks. On 1 June 1770 the fleet abandoned Navarino, destroying part of it as it went, and left the castle to the Ottomans again; the rising itself failed.

The Greek Revolution reached Pylia in March 1821. The Greek inhabitants rose under their notables and local captains, Georgakis, Yannis and Nikolaos Oikonomidis, and besieged Neokastro from 25 March until 9 August. The garrison surrendered in the first week of August 1821 on an assurance of safe passage, and the surrender turned instead into the massacre of Navarino.

The fortress stayed in Greek hands until Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt came for it. Landing at Methoni in 1825, he crushed the Greek army at Kremmydia, then seized the island of Sphacteria and put to the sword its two hundred defenders together with their leaders Anagnostaras, Anastasios Tsamados, Sachinis, Zafeiropoulos and Katsaros, and the Italian philhellene Santarosa. He then closed the siege around the castle, cut the water of its aqueduct and bombarded it for three days. Among the fighters holding it were Makriyannis, the brothers Emmanouil and Dimitrios Kallergis, D. Sachtouris and Yannis Mavromichalis; short of food and ammunition, with no prospect of reinforcement, they capitulated on 11 May 1825. Ibrahim honoured the terms of withdrawal and received Makriyannis and the other Greek commanders with honours.

Ibrahim held Neokastro until the allied fleets ended his campaign. In October 1827 the combined English, French and Russian squadrons destroyed the Turco-Egyptian fleet at Navarino and forced him to abandon the Peloponnese. The Ottoman-Egyptian garrison remained inside the walls until the fortress was handed to the French troops of the Morea expedition under General Nicolas Joseph Maison, who landed on 30 August 1828 and quartered himself in the castle to oversee the Egyptian withdrawal. It was completed on 4 October 1828.

The engineers of the French corps laid out a new town beside the walls to a street plan in 1829, and it grew chiefly after 1830. In its first years it went by the castle's own name, Niokastron or New Navarino, until a royal decree of 1833 gave it the name Pylos in honour of the ancient city, whose site has still not been fixed with certainty. A further decree of 9 April 1835 made Pylos the seat of the municipality of Pylia, in the third class of municipalities, with a population of 782. The fortress mosque, built between 1573 and 1595 under Murad III, had by then served as a Catholic church under the Venetians and as a mosque again under the returning Ottomans; after the liberation of the region it became the Orthodox church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, which it remains, under the Metropolis of Messenia.

The castle itself was abandoned. German and Italian forces took it back into use in the Second World War as a base for their operations, and the Pasha Building, a long two-part stone hall of the seventeenth or eighteenth century standing in the outer enclosure where the castle settlement had once spread, served as a prison through the occupation of 1941 to 1944. After the war the acropolis was used as a prison for a time longer, until the Greek police authorities handed the fortress to the Archaeological Service in 1953. Most of the structures inside the walls were demolished then; the Pasha Building was one of the few spared.

Niokastro is a protected archaeological site in the municipality of Pylos-Nestor, and the buildings that came through its prison years have been returned to public use. The restoration was the idea of Georgios Papathanasopoulos, first head of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, who meant to create a centre of underwater research to match the one at Bodrum; he never managed to build it, but in the judgement of the ephorate's later head Angeliki Simosi, without him the restoration of the castle would never have happened. The Pasha Building, renovated in 2010, has housed the ephorate's museum without a break since 2012. Maison's barracks, the two-storey stone block to the left of the fortress entrance whose upper floor once held the Messenian Library given by the publisher Notis Karavias, opened in August 2018 as the Archaeological Museum of Pylos. Of the old settlement within the walls only ruins are left.