TAXIDI: Greece's Unspoiled Peloponnese

I have long been a worshipper of the solitary pleasures of the Peloponnese. Culturally sacred, sublimely beautiful, under-populated and lacking in mass tourism, its pull cannot be overstated. Our culture and myths are bed-rocked on the stories of its bewitching towns, mountains and valleys, which have haunted our collective imagination: Arcadia, Laconia, Sparta, and Corinth. Its ancient sites are Greece?s best: the utterly preserved theater at Epidaurus; lushly idyllic Olympia; Agamemnon?s Mycenae; the beautiful mongrel ? Ottoman, Frankish and Venetian by turns ? of Nafplio, and the heavenly Byzantine enclaves of Monemvasia and Mystras. The key to its unspoilt loveliness is that the Peloponnese has been a backwater for two centuries, its population in decline thanks to emigration, especially after the devastations of the Second World War and the civil war. Tourists make a predictable beeline for the islands while Athenians think of the Peloponnese as the conservative peasant of Greece.

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