Stay in Agios Ioannis, Kynouria | Springs & Waterfalls

Agios Ioannis — Agiannis to locals — sits at 750 metres on the eastern slopes of Mount Parnon, 17 kilometres west of Astros, in the municipality of North Kynouria. Stone mansions with arches and battlements, old fountains on every corner and a view that runs down to the Argolic Gulf: in summer the village fills with families who have come back for generations; in winter most of its 70 residents move down to Astros, and the lanes grow quiet.

The Lepida waterfalls

Four kilometres from the village, the Lepida gorge drops in two cascades — a large fall of about 70 metres and a smaller one of 45 metres, some 800 metres apart, with a blue pool below. A dirt road of about three kilometres from Agiannis leads to a short walk of 200 metres to the big fall. Come in spring, when the springs of the Xerokampi plateau run full; by late summer the water thins out.

Springs and water mills

Water is the village’s story. Its fountains still carry their old names — Soulinari, Perdikoneri, Pigadaki, Mousga — and beneath the church of Prodromos a spring rises clear and cold. That same spring once turned four water mills, which worked until not so long ago.

Two post-Byzantine churches

The churches of Prodromos and Agios Georgios, domed basilicas from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, anchor the village. The wall paintings of Agios Georgios still bear scenes of Ottoman swordsmen, a rare glimpse of the centuries the village lived through.

A capital for the summer of 1822

In the summer of 1822, from 15 August to 1 October, Agios Ioannis served as the seat of the Provisional Government of revolutionary Greece. The village had also given the Revolution its fighters and, decades earlier, a school: the Karytsiotis School, founded in 1798 by the educator Dimitrios Karytsiotis, whose founding inscription still survives. In 1826 Ibrahim’s army burned the village to the ground; it was rebuilt stone by stone.