Vlochos

The hill of Strongylovouni, just south of the village of Vlochos and four kilometres north of Palamas in Karditsa, carries extensive ruins of fortifications from several eras, though no settlement ever stood within them. The ancient city itself lay on the flat ground called Patoma at the hill’s southern foot, where inscriptions and buried walls have come to light. The site’s identity remains uncertain; it was once linked to ancient Peirasia, now placed near Ermitsi, and possibly to ancient Fakion. William Leake noted the remains around 1803 without visiting, and Johan Louis Ussing first described them in 1847. Excavations followed in the 1960s, when a quarry was closed and the area protected, then by Jean-Claude Decourt in the 1980s, and finally by the Swedish-led Vlochos Archaeological Project from 2016 to 2018.

Four building phases span roughly 1,200 years, from the Late Archaic to the Early Byzantine period. The earliest fortification, from about 500 BC, ran 1.3 kilometres with brick walls on stone foundations, still standing over two metres high, and featured two zigzag roads climbing the slopes, one over a kilometre long and five to six metres wide. A later Hellenistic wall, with eighteen square towers, created the largest ancient acropolis in central Greece, enclosing 480,000 square metres. The city was abandoned around 200 BC, likely after the Second Macedonian War, leaving only buried traces of streets and houses beneath the plain.