Eighteen years ago, when we lived in Greece, Nafplion was our go-to day trip away from the chaos of pre-Crisis Athens, where I worked as a banker. Driving through orange groves producing the world’s greatest citrus, the Veneto-Ottoman-Neoclassical city rose like a mirage on an escarpment across its wide bay, flanked by the haunting Peloponnesian mountains. Often enough, we would ensconce ourselves in the shaded awnings of Napoli di Romania café, which looked straight at the island fortress of the Bourtzi and unbeknownst to us—at the time—owned by koumbaroi strongly connected to my Utah family.
A return with purpose
Having visited, over a decade ago, Nafplion with my son, it seemed proper to introduce my daughter to the place. Our Father-Daughter trip was a “Nostos Journey”—visiting family, friends who are family, koumbaroi, and research colleagues. Aside from Athens and its glories Classical, Byzantine and Modern, and of course our Hydriot homeland, Greece’s first capital was a must visit, and again our Nafplion koumbaroi welcomed us and shuttled us around.
Nafplion is one of Greece’s prettiest towns and much of its current structure stems from the late Venetian Era, when the Venetians wrested the Peloponnesus from the Ottomans from 1699 to 1715. There is considerable civic and military infrastructure, along with a large natural harbour, which made it an immediate target for the Greek revolutionaries in 1821, and a natural choice for the capital when the Greeks’ guns (all too often pointed at each other), silenced by a semblance of independence, in 1828. This area, together with the surrounding mountains and the nearby islands, was the heartland of the Greek Revolution.
Where a nation took root
In Nafplion, Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfu aristocrat with global diplomatic and cultural experience, took on the thankless task of trying to create a semblance of a state from a hodgepodge of now-impoverished islanders whose ships lay at the bottom of the Aegean, Peloponnesian warrior clans, sophisticated—yet locally clueless—diasporans from Odessa, Marseilles, and Trieste, and Chiot, Cretan, Macedonian, and Asia Minor refugees.
Nafplion is where the Russo-Greek officer Dimitris Ypsilantis held court in a building across the street from the Trieste Greek heiress Manto Mavrogenous. If we are to believe the film about the heroine staring the dashing Jenny Karezi, they crossed the street often.
It must have been a very cosmopolitan place for a few years, as an aging count burned the midnight oil directing with incredible granularity his vision for a new Greece, though he came up against the factionalism and self-centeredness of the “Greek Reality,” which cost him his life. On the same street where we stayed this trip in a pension named after Rhigas Pheraios (who inspired it all), there is the Church of St. Spyridon. As a Corfiot, Count Kapodistrias frequented the church of his island’s patron saint. He was shot and stabbed by the brother and son of Petrobey Mavromihalis, in revenge for the latter’s arrest by Kapodistrias’ government.
A filmic scenario
When we visited, acclaimed Greek director Yiannis Smaragdis was filming for his feature on Greece’s first governor Kapodistrias. We got to see several scenes filmed, and to speak to Smaragdis and to Greek actors in period clothing, further props to historicize the place as I sought to put the story of Greece in perspective to my daughter.
In the post assassination chaos, Greece’s three protecting powers—Britain, France, and Russia—selected a seventeen-year-old Bavarian prince, Otto. Otto arrived in Nafplio with advisor-regents from Bavaria who ran the state until his majority, and with several contingents of Bavarian soldiers.
Querulous Greece was to be remade in the Bavarians’ image. Today, an older rendition of Otto in marble faces a small square, and across the street from the statue of the meticulous, martyred governor whose shoes he tried to fill. Greece’s troubled youth, led by a youthful, foreign king, is rarely discussed, yet childhood, happy or traumatic, extends into adulthood. What happened then impacts now, and in the lovely, well-kept lanes of this town, there are clues and riddles.
Shadows of empire, dreams of glory
One of the most important impacts of the “Othonian Era” for Nafplion was the advisor-regents’ decision to relocate the Greek capital to Athens. In a country almost devoid of any infrastructure, Athens was lacking, yet the classically oriented Bavarians fell for the dream of Periclean Athens, and swept aside questions of suitability, building a capital in the shadow of the Acropolis. Quietly receding into a pleasant obscurity, Nafplion remains a pleasant and revealing time capsule of Greece’s Venetian, Ottoman, Revolutionary past.
Perhaps enabled by the movie set and period actors in both Foustanella and the “Frankish” clothes of Kapodistrias, it was easy to conjure scenes of the 1830s. One of Phanariots in Ottoman wear side-by-side with grizzled Hydriots and Spetsiotes in vrakes, and all versions of Foustanella of hardy mountaineers from the fastness of the Morea, Rumeli, Macedonia and beyond. The state they created was a Byzantine successor, put through a traumatic vise of Ottoman and Venetian rule, and the Bavarians added a coat of Classical paint without really addressing what lay beneath. It remains an open question if anything has really changed.
Nafplion is a must see for every Greek, or any Philhellene. With its shaded, lovely alleys, filled with delightful restaurant, bars, and boutiques, you have a download of the complicated nation that is Modern Greece.
Clues linger in every corner about our real identity, one that includes the ancients but is more directly related to proximate history. Though they disagreed on most things, the complex, complicated, and often highly cosmopolitan milieu that populated this charming Venetian village in the 1830s understood this well.
*Alexander Billinis, is a PhD candidate in history and a lecturer at Clemson University, he focuses on the role of Greek cotton merchants in the 19th-century Atlantic World cotton trade and he is a regular contributor to Neos Kosmos.
