Lost Capital of Bizantium

Lost Capital of Bizantium

By: John Frelly

I REMEMBER my first sight of Mistra in the spring of 1973, when we drove through the mountains of the Peloponnesus to find the ruins of the city that was once the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, one of the last outposts of Byzantium. We finally reached the site an hour or so before sunset, when we saw the conical hill crowned with the walls and towers of a crusader castle, with the ruins of the Palace of the Despots and a score of Byzantine churches clustering on the western slope below. The ghost city was shaded by spectral cypresses, the surrounding Vale of Sparta embowered in olive groves and fruit orchards, five snow-covered peaks of Mount Tagetus looming above the abandoned medieval capital to which we were making a pilgrimage. [download]

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