Agios Floros

On a long, narrow hill called Kastrouli, about 1,400 metres north-east of Agios Floros in Messinia, lie the ruins of a fortification of genuinely uncertain age. Though sometimes labelled Byzantine, its dry-stone walls, built without mortar from rough, unshaped stones, point to a far older origin, probably in the Late Helladic period of the mid-second millennium BC. Surface pottery fragments do nothing to contradict this, and no historical source mentions the place at all. The castle covers some 5,000 square metres in two walled sections, the northern roughly 3,000 and the southern 2,000, with additional outworks of 80 and 65 metres respectively defending the vulnerable eastern flanks. The walls survive only at low height, the southern part reduced largely to stone piles. Its position commands superb views over the Pamisos plain to the Messinian Gulf, with visual contact to the castles of Pidima and Tsoukalaika, and it likely functioned as a small fort rather than a settlement. Nearby, an independent wall called Aradaria runs about a kilometre from Agios Floros to the hill's western foot.