Salmeniko Castle

Local French barons of the Latin Principality of Achaea built the castle between 1280 and 1310, on a hill at the foot of Panachaiko in Achaea, and a large town grew up around it over the years. The river Foinikas ran past below steep cliffs on one side, and no fortifications were needed there.

In 1460 Sultan Mehmed II invaded the Peloponnese, and the castles of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea submitted one after another, most of them without a fight. Salmeniko was the last to hold out, under the command of Graitzas Palaiologos and crowded with refugees from other districts. The sultan sent a messenger demanding the immediate surrender of town and castle; the inhabitants refused, knowing that surrender elsewhere had meant slavery or death, and the siege opened the next day. It was the last garrison of the Byzantine Empire, still under arms eight years after Constantinople fell in 1453.

The siege lasted a year. The Ottoman guns could not bring the walls down, and the lower town gave in only after the Janissaries found the line carrying its water from the river and cut it. Local tradition remembers sponges let down on ropes to draw water from the river, until the Janissaries noticed and cut them. The historian Stefanos Thomopoulos put the town's people at 6,000; about nine hundred of their children were taken for the devşirme to be trained as Janissaries, and the rest were sold into slavery.

Graitzas and a number of defenders still held the citadel above the fallen town. He made free passage for his men into Venetian-held country his condition for giving it up. Mehmed accepted and departed for Aigio, leaving a certain Hamouzas as governor of the Peloponnese and Thessaly and charged with seeing the garrison out; Hamouzas disregarded the agreement and arrested the first men who tried to leave. Told of it, Mehmed replaced him with Zaganos Pasha and left the Peloponnese, whereupon Zaganos in his turn renewed the siege of the citadel. Trusting him no further, Graitzas made a sortie in July 1461, broke through, reached the coast and got away by ship to Nafpaktos, the Lepanto of the Venetians. With the fall of Salmeniko the whole Peloponnese passed under Ottoman rule, apart from the Venetian holdings at Nafplion, Methoni, Koroni and Monemvasia.

Castle and town are ruins now, in the modern municipality of Aigialeia: a little of the wall and a few of the houses, though a bridge of the period survives intact. Much of the castle has come down with the mountain it was built on, in subsidence that continues still, and the side where the ruins lie is all but unreachable for the landslides. In the bed of the river nearby stands the rock of Oria, where local tradition holds a princess was killed by a traitor during the siege.