Fief Churches

Church of Ag. Adrianos, near Nauplion.

I recently became interested in fief churches after I realized I had identified three in the vicinity of Nauplion. I will have more to say about fiefs later on, but fief churches are one way to identify fiefs. We have too little information on fiefs, although we have a great deal of information on landholdings in general, and I have written several entries here about that information.  For example:

Cosmina

Mapping the Territory, 1

Mapping the Territory, 2

A visit to the Nauplion area early this month allowed me the provisional identification of a few more.  I have not worked out a satisfactory set of criteria for identification: in most cases I find rebuilding has obliterated architectural distinctions I would have expected, and in one case I have the before-and-after photographs that would prove it.  Take Ag. Thomas at Midea about which I have written. Here you see the north end of the cross-vault in 1978, looking through to the arched south windows.  I marked on the photograph the cross made with 8 or so inserted bowls, such as are found on Ag. Triada at Merbaka. I was unable to tell if the bowls were still in position and only whitewashed.

Ag. Thomas, Midea

Now the south side with its 8 or so bowls.  The bowls are characteristic of Frankish churches, though the church would have been built by Greek labor and we see this in the arches and dentil ornamentation. This little 13th-century church is perched on a small hill that looks across the plains from Midea to Nauplion.

Ag. Thomas, Midea

Now for the improved modern version of the church.  All traces of the cross-vault have been removed, with the molding, the arches, and the plates:

Ag. Thomas, Midea

It would be unrecognizable as the same building were it not for my photographs.

Another identification as a fief chapel is the presence of Western frescos, and I have written about the two I found here.  One is at Ag. Marina at Kazarma, an endearingly clumsy chapel with a 14th-century fresco behind the iconostasis of a man in red and a woman in white.

Rear view of Ag. Marina, Kazarma.

and then at Ag. Sotira where far up to the right when you first enter is the remains of a fresco with Westerners looking up to a Franciscan-style cross.  The fief of this church has been through a number of incarnations, and I suspect perhaps a little piracy might have been involved, given its private landing beach.

Roof of Ag. Sotira, Asine.

I reported these frescos to the Archaeological Service in 08-09, but nothing has been done towards their study or preservation.  Nor has anything been done for the fortified tower at Ag. Sotira which was 4 stories high in 1978, but is now down to 3 stories.

A church need not have been built by Franks or Venetians to have become a fief church, though I suspect there was very little pre-emption of religious space in terms of fiefs.  As an example, here is the tiny church at Plataniti from about 1100, I Metamorphosis,  and then the newer clumsily-Western-built church a stone's throw away.

12th C, Plataniti.

13th C, Plataninti.

I wasn't able to stand where I could get a complete shot of the facade of I Koimisi, but I did get one of its two surviving bowls.

I think the church at the top of this entry, Ag. Adrianos, was built as a fief church, although it has been so improved and restored and rebuilt and hedged and locked against visitors, that it is difficult to say.  These are the only two pictures I was able to get because of the barricades.

Ag. Adrianos, Ag. Adrianos-Katsingri

It was, however, the church on the fief where Cyriaco went in the previous entry to find his Mycenae.  A fresco in it gives a restoration date of 1713, and it is mentioned in a Venetian document of 1696.  My interest is more in the earlier fiefs, but fiefs were assigned again when the Venetians came in 1686.

Another church documented then, and in 1500 is Ag. Paraskevi on the side of the road up Palamidi.  It, too, has been restored almost beyond recognition and given new bright frescos although I think it is distinctively Western-built.

Ag. Paraskevi, Palamidi.

Ag. Paraskevi, Palamidi.

It was, once, a Santa Veneranda, being out in the area where the Albanians were living, though I think it was built well before they arrived.  We have a 1500 reference to the Strada S. Veneranda, which was the road from Nauplion out to the side of Palamidi and over the hill to Karathona beach.

As a final church, Ag. Nikolaos at Iria, near the coast, and also in an area that became Albanian.  It has the date of 1381 carved over the western entrance.

Ag. Nikolaos, Iria.

There are certainly more churches in the Argolid to identify and I may have been reckless about some of these. I can only hope for the opportunity of another visit.  Meanwhile, I would be grateful for more information and corrections from readers.

(My thanks to Hermes Car Rental in Nauplion (down from the bus stop) for the darling little red car that was such a delight to drive to these churches.)

Nauplion: Walls

This dim and damaged painting is from the eave of a house in Nauplion -- take the street to the left of the bus station, first corner to the right -- to my knowledge, the only remaining 19th-century house with eave-paintings left in the city.

Other houses, much restored, have these curved eaves but they show stenciled ornamentation: pre- and post-independence ornamentation made extensive use of stencils. This house, built shortly after 1830, has hand-painted swags of flowers, a parrot, and this exceptional view of the walls of Nauplion with columned buildings that were never there. At that date, Nauplion's walls were mostly wrecked, and the remaining towers were of a different design. In fact, most pre-modern views of Nauplion show buildings that no one who lived there would ever recognize: Venetian images have Venetian houses from the terraferma, and later artists show Ottoman fantasies, but the eave painting seems to have been influenced by an image from a popular book.

This book published by G. N Wright in 1840 and called The Shores and Islands of the Mediterranean included a steel-engraving of a view of Nauplion from the water -- a detail here. When the image is enlarged, you can see a number of white-columned buildings, pediments, acroteria -- the various signals of classical Greek architecture. A Nauplion painter, then, saw the picture -- or the owner of the house had a copy of the picture -- and it was used for the wreathed cartouche over the front door of the house.

A second image, or one of the many derived from it, possibly contributed a tower to the cartouche -- the Camoccio map excerpted here several times previously. The artist of Shores and Islands never saw towers like this at Nauplion: this is a 15th-century design for defense against small shipboard cannon. Those towers were built about 1700 for a different kind of defense, when the harbor was too shallow for the high-decked ships of the period to come in close enough to be of danger.
Those small black keyholes in the towers are sighting blocks for small cannon. You can see several of them in the walls at Methoni, but Nauplion has only one left and that one is upside down, in a tower by one of the swimming clubs past the end of the waterfront. But it is possible that the tower of the cartouche was painted from one of the towers up on Akro-Nauplion.

The configuration of the largest street in Nauplion follows the line of the walls in this engraving. The street that ends at the Bibliotheke Palamidi occupies the space where this (actually, straight) harbor wall stood. Where the print shows water and wooden piers, there are now schools, hotels, Hermes Car Rental, the Peloponnesian Folklore Museum, Savouras Restaurant, and others. Much of Nauplion is built on landfill, intentionally as of 1480 and the Venetians, from silt brought down by a stream that disappeared in the 19th century, and in the last decade from a vigorous program of fill and construction.

That is all concrete and corners and has nothing to do with this small proud crumbling cartouche of an idealized city, the capital city of a free Greece with its mighty protective walls and the columns of its glorious heritage.

Dimitrios Antoniou called my attention to the content of this cartouche, an image I had photographed but not thought about. The 1840 Nauplion engraving is found in The Nauplion of the Foreign Travellers by Aphrodite Kouria, a 2007 publication of the National Bank of Greece available in, among other places, the gift shop of the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation in Nauplion.