Gianitsa, Yanitsa, Janizza

The castle at Gianitsa, also known as Yanitsa or Janizza, stands in ruins on a hill above the village of Eleochori in Messinia, roughly ten kilometres east of Kalamata and uphill from it. The summit offers a commanding view over Kalamata and the entire Messinian Gulf. The site appears to have been fortified first in the Classical or Hellenistic period, between the sixth and third centuries BC, despite some researchers loosely calling the walls Cyclopean or Pelasgian. Much later, in the Middle Ages, a modest fortified settlement grew there, inhabited until the Ottoman period. The location is now identified with the ancient commune of Kalamai mentioned by Pausanias, correcting an earlier belief that Kalamai lay at modern Kalamata.

The hill's later history is bound up with the Melingoi, a Slavic tribe settled in the region after the plague of 746-747. Their territory, the Zygos of Melingos, stretched to Gianitsa. In 1293, two prominent locals, Lianortis and Fanaris, led a night raid that captured Kalamata's castle with some six hundred Slavs, an act that broke the Treaty of Glarentza and briefly placed the city under Byzantine Mystras before it was returned to the Franks.