The Ever-Presence of Mythology on Greece’s Peloponnese Peninsula

I am looking for the gates to Hades, but have overshot the turn. Somewhere below is the cave from which Heracles dragged the fearsome three-headed dog Cerberus into daylight so bright its slobber formed yellow flowers of aconite. Instead, I find a beach of pale rock and water that’s glass-calm to the horizon. Beneath its surface are hundreds of curled little fish with flanks of tarnished silver.

I’m in mountainous Southern Greece, midway through an epic road trip across the Peloponnese, the four-tentacled peninsula connected to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth and surrounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, and the Aegean to the east. This storied peninsula contains traces of classical, Venetian, Byzantine, and Turkish rule. Modern European history springs from the Peloponnese. It is home to Sparta and Olympia, names that sound so like myths of antiquity you might forget they’re actual places. There are towns such as Kardamyli, so lovely that Agamemnon offered it to sulky Achilles to lure him out of bed to fight the Trojan War. In deepest Mani, the longest of the peninsula’s tentacles—one of the last wild parts of Europe, a place that turned back even the Ottomans—the cliffs and gorges seem to be made of shadows, and empty stone villages rupture the sky like mausoleums.

I started at Porto Heli, a resort town in a bay in the Argolic Gulf. Tall villas as creamy as squill spike the cliffs, and there’s a modern marina full of boats dotted with drying swimsuits and hungover yachters reading newspapers. From here to the island of Spetses it’s an irresistible five minutes in a water taxi. Famed for its occupants’ shipbuilding and naval skills, this territory, especially the islands of Hydra and Spetses, played a crucial role in overcoming nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule, and there are reminders everywhere of the Revolution of 1821 along this eastern rim of the Peloponnese. I’m in time for the annual regatta, catching a lift with a group of sailors who are preparing to unfurl a vast revolutionary flag on a sail for one of the races.

Later, when I’m on Spetses and wandering past its lovely neoclassical houses and old mariners’ mansions, the first wind in weeks picks up, and even the cicadas seem to dig themselves out of the oleander and languid weeds. I hear billows of conversation from restaurants, some with tables set on pebbles inches from the water. Diners raise drams of Greek brandy over plates of octopus and watch visitors from Athens dragging suitcases up to rented rooms with balconies shaped like mermaid tails.

Walking to Dapia, the island’s main port town, one night I pass kids waiting for the little cinema to open and show a new animation about the mythical Icarus, whose spirit rises from the sea at night to play with the stars. Parents and children race past on electric bikes with wet towels in their knapsacks as I arrive at the family-run Poseidonion Grand Hotel, a great, solid, frosted-yellow cake of a building built in 1914. At breakfast the staff wheel out a whole oozing honeycomb that looks molten. The square out front is a chaos of boat crews jostling at the regatta awards. It’s easy to see why Spetses has been the setting for several extraordinary books, including John Fowles’s The Magus and Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.

All that evening over dinner, the hotel’s owner, Emmanuel Vordonis, relives moments from his childhood visits to the island like a Homeric host reciting ballads, as the hotel cat, Lucia, dangles her paws through the railings of the terrace and, below us, women step off yachts wearing backless dresses in exuberant colors. Eventually the 75-year-old Vordonis raises his glass and declares that his final ambition in a sea-centered life is to raise a 100-foot schooner long-sunk off the coast of Crete and sends me off with a salute: “We are good people, we are good creatures!” His voice fades behind me as I make my way up the cobbles under a spray of low-voltage lights. Hurrying his way back from some regatta reception, pulling a Panama hat off his tousled fair hair, is Pavlos, the 30-something great-great-great-great-grandson of the spectacular Greek naval commander and Spetsian war heroine Laskarina Bouboulina. She was the first woman to obtain the rank of admiral and, in 1821, scoured a Revolution battlefield trying to match the body of her son to his head in a scene straight from Sophocles.

After the dazed dreaminess of the island, hitting the road on the mainland and dropping down into Inner (or “deep”) Mani during a string of blazing days feels like a jolt of concentrated drama. The one real road is banked with thistles five feet high. Everywhere are chapels built on once-pagan shrines, mule tracks, and mostly abandoned village fortresses. Maniots claim descent from the ancient Spartans (Napoleon’s bodyguards were all from the Mani—tough as hell), but after several lifetimes of emigration and endless feuds, few residents now remain. Here it’s hot and stark, gorgeously ragged; sheep with clinking bells kick up dust in the lanes in hill villages such as Vathia.

When I retreat to the Kyrimai Hotel in the quiet port of Gerolimenas, I walk from the dusty car directly into the cool water off its shore, acutely aware that the view along this rocky coastline hasn’t changed much since…forever. The past feels intensely close. Superstition, fragments of folklore, the spirit of the solitary hills: It all gets inside me, until every lyric on the local radio station sounds like something from the 17th-century epic poem Erotokritos—even Dimitris Mitropanos belting out his overwrought ’90s hit “Rosa,” about the love of his life being born from doom and brimstone. As I clamber back up to the road, the swallows overhead aren’t doing their usual ecstatic twisting but are drifting on the thermals like wisps of gossamer.

The terrain to the north is greener, the landscape curling into vast walls of olive trees. I stop at the Patrick Leigh Fermor House. The British World War II soldier, renowned travel writer, and lover of the Mani bequeathed his home to the Benaki Museum in 1996—it’s now a retreat for writers and scholars and, for four months out of the year, available to rent. I find, in the sudden cool of his seaside study, two faces gazing from the wall: a sketch of his wife, Joan, looking stern, and Lord Byron on a mounted 19th-century plate. The poet’s expression is plump and satisfied, as though comprehending deeply his love of Greece and the benefits of great glugs of the world’s best olive oil. Olives are emblems of peace, goodness, and triumph. At one time, 70 percent of all Greek olives were found in the Mani.