Pylos
Pylos, historically also known as Navarino, is a town and a former municipality in Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform, it has been part of the municipality Pylos-Nestoras, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It was the capital of the former Pylia Province. It is the main harbour on the Bay of Navarino. Nearby villages include Gialova, Pyla, Elaiofyto, Schinolakka, and Palaionero. The town of Pylos has 2,568 inhabitants, the municipal unit of Pylos 4,559. The municipal unit has an area of 143.911 km2.
Pylos has been inhabited since Neolithic times. It was a significant kingdom in Mycenaean Greece, with the remains of the so-called "Palace of Nestor" excavated nearby, named after Nestor, the king of Pylos in Homer's Iliad. In Classical times, the site was uninhabited, but became the site of the Battle of Pylos in 425 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. After that, Pylos is scarcely mentioned until the 13th century, when it became part of the Frankish Principality of Achaea. Increasingly known by its French name of Port-de-Jonc or its Italian name Navarino, in the 1280s the Franks built the Old Navarino castle on the site. Pylos came under the control of the Republic of Venice from 1417 until 1500, when it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans used Pylos and its bay as a naval base, and built the New Navarino fortress there. The area remained under Ottoman control, with the exception of a brief period of renewed Venetian rule from 1685–1715 and a Russian occupation from 1770–71, until the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt recovered it for the Ottomans in 1825, but the defeat of the Turco-Egyptian fleet in the 1827 Battle of Navarino and the French military intervention of the 1828 Morea expedition forced Ibrahim to withdraw from the Peloponnese and confirmed Greek independence. The current city was built outside the fortress walls by the military engineers of the Morea expedition from 1829 and the name Pylos was revived by royal decree in 1833.
Name
Pylos retained its ancient name into Byzantine times, but after the Frankish conquest in the early 13th century, two new names appear:- a French one, Port-de-Jonc or Port-de-Junch, with some variants and derivatives: in Italian Porto-Junco, Zunchio or Zonchio, in medieval Catalan Port Jonc, in Latin Iuncum, in Greek, etc. It takes that name from the marshes surrounding the place.
- a Greek one, , later shortened to or lengthened to by epenthesis, which became Navarino in Italian and Navarin in French. Its etymology is not certain. A traditional etymology, proposed by the early 15th-century traveller Nompar de Caumont and repeated as late as the works of Karl Hopf in the 19th century, ascribed the name to the Navarrese Company, but that is clearly an error since the name was in use long before the Navarrese presence in Greece. In 1830, Fallmereyer proposed that it could originate from a body of Avars who settled there, a view adopted by a few later scholars like William Miller. Modern scholarship, on the other hand, considers it more likely that it originates from a Slavic name meaning "place of maples". The name of Avarinos/Navarino, although in use before the Frankish period, came into widespread use and eclipsed the French name of Port-de-Jonc and its derivations only in the 15th century, after the collapse of the Frankish Principality of Achaea.
Under Ottoman rule, the Turkish name was . After the construction of the new Ottoman fortress in 1571/2, it became known as among the local Greeks, while the old Frankish castle became known as .
History
Neolithic Pylos
The region of Pylos has a long history, which goes hand in hand with that of the Peloponnese. It starts in the depths of prehistory, as the region has been inhabited since the Neolithic, when populations from Anatolia began to spread in the Balkans and Greece around 6500 BC, bringing with them the practice of agriculture and farming. Excavations have demonstrated a continuous human presence from the Late Neolithic period on several sites of Pylia, in particular in those of Voidokilia and of Nestor's ''cave'', where numerous ostraca or fragments of painted, black and polished ceramics have been found, as well as later engraved and written pottery. The Neolithic period ended with the appearance of bronze metallurgy around 3000 BC.Mycenaean Pylos
During the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean civilization developed, particularly in Peloponnese. Pylos then became the capital of one of the most important human centers of this civilization and of a powerful kingdom, often referred to as Nestor's kingdom of "sandy Pylos" and described later by Homer in both his Iliad and his Odyssey when Telemachus says:The Mycenaean state of Pylos covered an area of and had a minimum population of 50,000 according to the Linear B tablets discovered there, or even perhaps as large as 80,000–120,000. It should not however be confused with the current city of Pylos. The urban center of ancient Pylos indeed remains only partially identified to date. The various archaeological remains of palaces and administrative or residential infrastructures that have been found in the region so far suggest to modern scholars that the ancient city would have developed over a much larger area, that of the Pylia Province. The typical point of reference for the Mycenaean city remains the Palace of Nestor, but many other palaces or villages of the Mycenaean era have been recently discovered, which were quickly subordinated to Pylos. Its port and its acropolis were probably established on the Koryphasion promontory commanding the northern entrance to the bay, 4 km north of the modern city and south of Nestor's palace, but no remains were found.The Pylos site is located on the hill of Ano Englianos, about 9 km northeast of the bay, near the village of Chora and about 17 kilometres from the modern city of Pylos. It hosts one of the most important Mycenaean palaces in Greece, known as the great "Palace of Nestor" described in the Homeric poems. This palace remains today the best preserved palace in Greece and one of the most important of all Mycenaean civilization. It was discovered and first excavated in 1939 by American archaeologist Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and by Konstantinos Kourouniotis of the Greek archaeological service. Their excavations were interrupted by the Second World War, and then resumed in 1952 under the direction of Blegen until 1966. He found many architectural elements such as the throne room with its foyer, an anteroom, rooms and passageways all covered with frescoes of Minoan inspiration, and also large warehouses, the external walls of the palace, unique baths, galleries, and 90 meters outside the palace, a beehive "tholos" tomb, perfectly restored in 1957.
In addition to the archaeological remains of the palace, Blegen also found there thousands of clay tablets with inscriptions written in Linear B, a syllabic script used between 1425 and 1200 BC for writing Mycenaean Greek. Pylos is the largest source in Greece of these tablets, with 1,087 fragments found on the site of Nestor's Palace. In 1952, when self-taught linguist Michael Ventris and John Chadwick deciphered the script, Mycenaean Greek turned out to be the earliest attested form of Greek, some elements of which have survived in the language of Homer thanks to a long oral tradition of epic poetry. Thus, these clay tablets, generally used for administrative purposes or for recording economic transactions, clearly demonstrate that the site itself was already called "Pylos" by its Mycenaean inhabitants.
In 2015, the team of American archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack L. Davis of the University of Cincinnati and under the aegis of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, discovered near the Tholos tomb IV, a shaft tomb dated to the Late Helladic IIA, of an individual of 30–35 years old and 1.70 m tall, the "Griffin warrior", named for the mythological creature, part eagle, part lion, engraved on an ivory plaque in his tomb. The tomb also contained armor, weapons, mirror and many pearl and gold jewels, including several gold signet rings of exceptional craftsmanship and thoroughness. Researchers believe it could be the grave of a Wanax, a tribal king, lord or military leader during the Mycenaean era. It was also in this tomb that was found the Pylos Combat Agate, a seal made of agate dated from around 1450 BC, which represents a warrior engaged in a hand-to-hand combat. In 2017, the same team discovered two other exceptional tholos tombs, Tholos tombs VI and VII. Although their domes had collapsed, they discovered that they were littered with flakes of gold leaf that once papered the walls and found a multitude of cultural artifacts and delicate jewelry, including a gold pendant representing the head of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, which showed for the first time that Pylos clearly had trade relations with Egypt and the Middle East around 1500 BC.
Pylos was the only palace of that time to have no walls or fortifications. It was destroyed by fire around 1180 BC, and many clay tablets in Linear B clearly bear the stigmata of the fire. The Linear B archives found there, preserved by the heat of the fire that destroyed the palace, mention hasty defence preparations due to an imminent attack without giving any detail about the attacking force. The site of the Mycenaean Pylos then seems to have been abandoned during the Dark Ages. The region of Pylos, together with that of the ancient Messene, was later enslaved by Sparta.
The ruins of a crude stone fortress on nearby Sphacteria, apparently of Mycenaean origin, were used by the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War.