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Modern Description: or SPETSES: As the first island in Greece to raise the flag of insurrection and to lead the others into the War of Independence which ultimately gained the country its freedom from Turkish dominion, Spetses holds a special place in the Greek imagination. The war in Greece was less than two weeks old when Spetses joined and its goals could not have been achieved without the vital contribution of the improvised navy which Spetses provided together with the islands of Hydra and Psará. A key figure in all this was Greece's national heroine, Laskarina Bouboulina, who from her base on the island made courageous inroads into the Ottoman hold on Greek territory. Her house is one of the monuments of Spetses. It and the many other large houses, nearly all dating from the 18th and early 19th centuries – including that of the family of Bouboulina's assassins – constitute the principal interest of the island and compose its urban landscape. It is a sober, classical architecture, similar to that on Hydra – only less concentrated and more scattered on Spetses. Cutting an unusual figure in the midst of this, are three conspicuous monuments of later date, built by the island's greatest benefactor, the tobacco magnate, Sotirios Anargyros, at the beginning of the last century – his neoclassical mansion, an élite school which bears his name, and a grand hotel which would not be at all out of place on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Anargyros was the first to see that, with the demise of its shipping fleet, the island's future lay in attracting a wealthy and cosmopolitan tourism.
The recorded history of the island is confined mostly to the last three hundred years; though excavations by Dimitris Theocharis on the promontory of Aghia Marina have shown that there was a flourishing Early Helladic settlement on the island in the mid-3rd millennium BC, with some later occupation in Mycenaean times. In historic antiquity the island is mentioned by name as Pityoussa. The Italians gave it the name ‘Spezia' or ‘Spezie' – either in reference to the pungent pine- and herb-scented air (‘spiced'), or to some perceived similarity with the verdant coast of La Spezia in Liguria. The island was settled during the 17th century by refugees from Turkish rule on the mainland. The abundance of wood both on the island and on the mainland favoured a flourishing industry of boat building. By the turn of the 19th century, the island's population was c. 18,000, and it possessed a large merchant fleet. The first open call in the Islands to revolutionary arms in the Greek War of Independence, was from Spetses on April 3rd 1821. Spetses, together with Hydra and Psará – the three ‘naval islands' as they are referred to – contributed the uprising's all-important navy. The island provided a number of prominent and successful naval commanders, and the country's best-known heroine, Laskarina Bouboulina, who led her own ships in the siege of Nauplia in 1822. After the war, the arrival of steam-ships sidelined Spetses and its fleet, and the island's economic situation languished. At the beginning of the 20th century, a Spetsiot tobacco magnate, Sotirios Anargyros, returned to Spetses and put his wealth into projects for the island – roads, aqueducts, an international hotel and an élite school – laying thereby the foundations of a tourist industry which sustains the island today. Devastating forest fires in the 1990's and in 2000 destroyed the greater part of the island's celebrated pine woods.
Earliest settlement was at the far eastern extremity of the island where a creek cuts deep into the coast, with a protective headland to its east side. This is the Old Harbour, or Palaio Limani, where artefacts from the Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine periods, as well as Bronze Age remains nearby, show that it was used and inhabited up until the 8th or 9th century, when pirate raids led to its abandonment. It was not until 700 years later, in the late 15th century, that settlers from the Peloponnese returned to the island, building themselves a base at Kastelli – the rise which now forms the highest point of the town, directly south of the point of disembarkation. This was fortified with a wall in the late 17th century. As both security and prosperity grew with the establishment of the island's commercial fleet, the area of habitation rapidly expanded down the slopes towards the shore to the point now referred to as the ‘Dapia', where the ferries and hydrofoils arrive. The old harbour became an active boatyard once again, and the island's richer, merchant families built houses along the 1.5 km of shore between the Dapia and the Old Harbour to its east, through the early decades of the 19th century. Later in the 19th century the stretch to the west of the Dapia was favoured and developed. Unlike Hydra there were no geographical confines to the space, and so the town extended freely in all directions. The early houses of the important families are built along Italianate lines, with loggias on their upper floors. The later archontiká, or mansions, were built to a more simple, symmetrical design, cubic in form with regularly spaced windows, as on Hydra. At first they had flat roofs, as elsewhere in the islands; but the influence of pitched and tiled roofs from the mainland of the Peloponnese soon prevailed. Greater colour and a whitewash to the walls is favoured on Spetses as opposed to the un-rendered stone which prevails on Hydra.
Wikidata ID: Q368275
Trismegistos Geo: 60759

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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