Well it is easier to defend a hill town. Mystras is a serious hill town. Noted to be the most important Byzantine site in Greece, it’s another UNESCO site that doesn’t get the love of Acropolis and Delphi but is just as amazing. It was apparently the last hurrah of the Byzantines, and Mystras was the cultural and religious center, before they were subsumed by the Ottomans. We are talking 1260's to 1460. The streets are so steep and narrow that a carriage could only move on the lower Main Street, the rest was on foot or with donkey. How they stuffed 15,000 people into this town boggles the mind but there you are. There were several churches...O.K. many churches, and some poorly preserved frescoes. One mosque from the Ottoman rule. Our friend King Otto shut down the monasteries and Mystras as part of an effort to consolidate the Greek Orthodox Church and used the town for his quarry for when he was building the 19th century Sparta. Efficient and ironic.
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