17 - The Peloponnese

Summary

GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTION

The Peloponnese, ‘Hellas of Hellas’ in a Greek epigram, is indeed the quintessence of all that is most Greek in physical terms. The influence of the sea is greater there than in any other canton of the Greek mainland; for the coastline is most deeply indented and ‘the island of Pelops’ is hardly a misnomer. The Mediterranean climate with its long, dry summer and mild, wet winter is most marked in the seaward-facing plain of Argos, and the combination of this climate with a heavier rainfall and a southerly latitude makes the plains of Messenia the most fertile in Greece. At the same time the lofty, rugged mountains of the Peloponnese endow the uplands with a continental climate which is often as severe as that of central and northern Greece. The mountains of Arcadia are as steep and crowded as those of Aetolia, and the high limestone basins of Arcadia resemble those of Epirus and Macedonia. The staples of the traditional Greek diet are particularly at home in the Peloponnese: bread, olives, figs and other fruit, legumes, cheese, meat and fish. Thus when any people moves from central or northern Greece to settle in the Peloponnese, it can find somewhere within it whatever climate, diet or way of life it had enjoyed before.

In 1930 only one sixth of the surface of the Peloponnese was cultivated, and of that, 62 per cent was devoted to cereals, primarily wheat, grown by peasant farmers who worked their own land as their predecessors in the fifth century B.C. did, according to Thucydides 1.141.3.