Welcome to Megalopolis, the ancient Great City turning a new page
Most people pass Megalopolis. The road from Tripoli to Kalamata runs straight through it, the town slides by the window — a working place, industrial at first glance, easy to leave for later. Later rarely comes.
That is the mistake. Just outside the modern town, on a plain crossed by the Helisson river, stands the ancient theatre of Megalopolis — one of the largest of the ancient world, cut into the hillside for some twenty thousand people. Beside it lie the remains of the Thersilion, the assembly hall where the Arcadian League met, argued and governed. This city was not built slowly. It was founded in the 370s BC as a single deliberate act: forty Arcadian villages brought together into one “Great City” to stand against Sparta. Polybius, the historian who explained Rome to the Greek world, was born here.
Around it the southwest of Arcadia opens up — the upper Alpheios valley, the foothills of Mount Lykaion, the castle of Karytaina on its cone of rock, Byzantine Leontari, and the chapel of Agia Theodora at Vasta with seventeen trees growing out of its roof. Distances are short. Crowds are not a concept here.
Staying around Megalopolis means staying somewhere that is still entirely itself: a bakery, a kafeneio, people who ask where you are from and mean it. Our hosts in this area are farmers, guesthouse families and producers before they are anything else.
Handpicked ideas around Megalopolis
Don’t miss
- The ancient theatre & the Thersilion — ten minutes from the town centre, and almost always empty.
- Karytaina — the castle village 19th-century travellers called “the Toledo of Greece”.
- Leontari — Byzantine churches on the old road south.
- Agia Theodora, Vasta — a 12th-century chapel that carries a small forest on its roof.
- Paradisia to Chranoi — following the bed of the old railway, one of the quietest walks in the valley.
- Mount Lykaion — the ash altar of Zeus and the ancient stadium, high above the valley.
- Bassae — the Temple of Apollo Epicurius, UNESCO-listed and still deserted, an hour west.
