Mistras

Mistras the old village

    By Ianis Paval and Alessandro Piermattei   

To begin with we didn’t expect much because we hadn’t heard of this town before. Mistras was a Greek town which was built in the 13th century after Christ. The name Mistras has a strange translation to Greek. It means cheese. Almost twenty thousand people lived there in Byzantine times.

Nowadays Mistras is mostly destroyed.  It isn’t old--it is just ruined. At the moment it is one of the most important places of Byzantine art. Byzantine is mostly late medieval times. Mistras has a lot of medieval churches where Byzantine art is represented, with paintings that show how the catholic religion and how Jesus were born. The churches are mostly destroyed because the place was temporarily under Turkish rule and since at the time most of them were muslim they didn’t not allow any reparation to the churches.

The historic and military adventures of Greece are completely different from the rest of Europe. Greece was caught in the middle of some wars. Mistras was one of the last towns that was destroyed. At the entrance of the city there is a statue of the last Greek emperor, Constantine XI, who was the last Byzantine emperor.

At the moment, in total the city contains a palace which in 1262 the citizens of Sparta used it as a place of shelter, churches, a museum, a cathedral and many churches. After we heard more about its history and its facts, we found out that this is an interesting city and it’s worth to look further into.       

Information from: Maria Elena