---

Modern Description: Approached from any angle, the landscape of Lake Dystos (59 km) is like a mirage: a strange cone of limestone rising from the middle of a sea of green, surrounded by bald hills. The alluvial lake itself, encircled by swallow-holes, is filled with water in spring and summer, and then recedes to a verdant reed-bed in summer and autumn. It shares a number of aspects of behaviour and appearance with Lake Copais across the water in neighbouring Boeotia, which is similarly a limestone-bound basin fed by seasonal waters. Lake Copais was the object of a massive project to drain and control its waters in prehistoric times which constitutes the earliest known, major hydraulic work of European history. It is interesting that a relief found on Euboea and now in the Museum of Epigraphy in Athens, bears a long 4th century BC inscription stipulating a contract between the people of Eretria (to which Dystos was subordinate) and an engineeer by the name of Chairephanis, to drain and control the water in Lake ‘Ptechon' (namely, Dystos), using many of the means adopted centuries earlier at Copais. In recent years an attempt has been made to convert areas of the lake into arable land by filling.
The isolated hill on the lake's east side is the site of ancient Dystos, inhabited since the Neolithic period, and settled in earliest Antiquity by Dryopians – a Pelasgian, pre-Hellenic people of obscure origin. (Access is by any of the tracks that lead west form the main road, south of the turn for Kóskina (58.5 km). Dense vegetation has engulfed many of the remains still on the surface and makes exploring the site arduous. The walls and terraces alone stand above the vegetation.) The site is highly panoramic with natural defences in the form of a steep drop to the lake on the western side. Describing a wide semicircle eastward from the west cliff, the line of the full enceinte of walls in polygonal construction, dating from the late 5th century, can be traced. The walls are 2m thick and in places still stand to 3m in height. There were in all eleven towers, and one gate with double bastions in the middle of the east side, which led north into the area of the agora. On the slopes of the hill – especially to the north where there are also protrusions of terraces in a later, isodomic construction method – are the remains of a number of houses built in ashlar masonry. They generally possessed an entrance passage, an inner court, a living room, bedrooms, and in some cases an upper storey. At the summit of the hill were the inner walls of the acropolis, the north part of which was converted into a Venetian fortress and tower.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystos
Wikidata ID: Q665173
Trismegistos Geo: 33362

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

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

---