Platamon Castle

The hill carried a settlement as far back as the Bronze Age, and the ancient Greek city of Herakleion stood on the site the castle now occupies; pottery of Euboean, Proto-Corinthian and Geometric type recovered in recent excavations suggests Greeks were here perhaps as early as the eighth century BC. Pseudo-Skylax, in the fourth century BC, records it as the first city of Macedonia, and Livy fixed its position more exactly, on a rock between Dion and Tempe. In 430 BC the Athenians seized the place to control the Thermaic Gulf and their possessions in Chalkidiki from it.

At the beginning of the third century BC the city and its harbour were destroyed, by whom is not known. Coming up from Thessaly in 169 BC, the Romans camped in the plain between Herakleion and Leivithra before opening their campaign against the Macedonian kingdom, and the acropolis with its low wall probably dates from about that time. The core of Herakleion has still to be found, though shells and coins point to the north-west side of the castle hill, and the cutting of a railway tunnel through the hill exposed further ground plans belonging to the ancient city.

The name Platamon first appears in 1198, in a chrysobull of the emperor Alexios Komnenos. After the Fourth Crusade, Pieria was granted in 1204 to Boniface of Montferrat as part of the Kingdom of Thessalonica, and Boniface passed its two castles to his knights: Kitros to Wirich von Daun, Platamon to the Lombard Rolando Piche. On Boniface's orders Piche raised the castle between 1204 and 1222, over a middle-Byzantine fortification, to hold the pass from Macedonia into Thessaly; Latin churches were founded at Platamon and Kitros under a Catholic bishop.

The Frankish tenure was short. About 1224 Theodore Komnenos Doukas took the castle as he brought down the Frankish Kingdom of Thessalonica.

The castle passed to Theodore's brother Manuel Komnenos Doukas, and was then annexed to the Despotate of Epirus by Michael Doukas. After the battle of Pelagonia in 1259 it fell to Michael VIII Palaiologos, emperor of Nicaea, who used it to hold the Franks taken prisoner in that battle. It served as a prison again in 1345, for the rebel Zealots after their defeat by Apokaukos.

The Turks took Platamon for the first time around 1385, but it soon passed into Venetian hands. In the fighting of 1425 the Venetians prevailed, and more than a hundred Turks were burned alive inside the castle. The Venetians held it only until 1427, when the Ottomans made their rule secure. They did not pull it down, seemingly because its position was too useful: it served as their base for operations against the rebels of neighbouring Olympus. Cannon defended it against pirates in the later Middle Ages, cisterns inside the walls held water against a long siege, and the donjon, ringed by a wall of its own, was the defenders' last retreat. Of the five churches that once stood within the circuit, only Agia Paraskevi survives; under Ottoman rule it was turned into a mosque.

The Venetian captain Angiolello, taken prisoner after a sea battle in 1470, noted in his diary that on 9 August the Sultan passed the night near a castle called Platimonia, from which one could see the gulf and the city of Thessaloniki.

Greek forces held the castle briefly in 1770, and again in 1825 and 1878. By the late eighteenth century Platamon was an armatoliki under Tsaknakis, and Georgakis Olympios served among its commanders. Captain Sachtouris bombarded it in 1897, after which the Ottomans abandoned it.

The last fighting came on 15-16 April 1941, when a New Zealand battalion met German units in the Platamon area and the engagement ended with the New Zealanders withdrawing. The castle is now in the care of the 9th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities and open to the public, and its acropolis serves as one of the venues of the Olympus Festival, hosting concerts and theatre in the open air.