Lykovouno

On a hill on the eastern flank of Taygetos, above the Eurotas valley and northeast of modern Dafni, lie the scattered remains of Lykovouno, a Byzantine settlement that has slipped almost entirely from the common record. The place evidently prospered from the tenth to the fifteenth century, and people continued to live there after the Byzantine world collapsed, right through to the late nineteenth century, when it was finally abandoned. What survives today is a rather poor jumble of building foundations, churches and fortification walls from both the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods. The most significant structure was the monastery of Agios Georgios, once reputed to be the wealthiest in the whole Peloponnese; the Turks destroyed it around 1700. The site is not much visited, and its history rests on recent finds and old testimony, but the ruins still speak of a long, quiet habitation on a strategic slope.