New Navarino Fortress

The Ottoman Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis built New Navarino in 1572/3, shortly after the Battle of Lepanto, to guard the southern entrance of the Bay of Pylos; the northern entrance was covered by the 13th-century Old Navarino castle of the Crusader Principality of Achaea. Unlike its medieval neighbour, Neokastro incorporates the lessons of gunpowder warfare: trace italienne walls, thick and sloped, strengthened with bastions — the 'Seventh' and 'Santa Maria' covering the harbour — and a citadel with six pentagonal bastions and almost 60 guns, linked by the long southern wall called the Great Bough.

Navarino served as a base for the Ottoman invasion of Crete in 1645, at the opening of the Cretan War. During the Morean War the Republic of Venice under Francesco Morosini captured both Navarino fortresses in 1686 and held them until the Ottomans retook the Peloponnese in 1715. Russian forces took the fortress after a six-day siege in April 1770, during the Orlov revolt, but abandoned it by June, destroying it in part. Only ruins survive of the settlement inside the walls, except the mosque, converted after Greek independence into an Orthodox church of the Transfiguration.