Steiri, Stiri

The hill of Boulios, or Agios Nikolaos, southeast of the Monastery of Saint Luke in Boeotia, holds the scant ruins of the acropolis of ancient Steiris, a city that later became a medieval castle. Though the site now falls within Boeotia, Steiris was originally a Phocian city, founded, so myth and Pausanias report, by the Athenian Peteos, exiled by King Aegeas. Its army fought at Chaeronea in 338 BC and against Brennus’s Gauls in 279 BC. The city survived destruction by Xerxes, Philip II and the Romans, and was still listed in the 6th century AD. In the 14th century, under Catalan rule, it was known as Estir, and documents record a tangle of mortgages and claims over the castle before it passed from Catalan hands around 1385.

The surviving fortifications show at least four building phases, from Mycenaean to medieval. A rough stone wall about a metre high, with square and semicircular towers, protects the eastern side; cliffs guard the rest. Inside are cisterns, tombs, a rock-cut royal tomb, and the church of Agios Nikolaos, built largely from ancient spolia, including an inscription to Asclepius.