The Peloponnese is just the place to ponder on lost supremacies: Turks, Venetians, Franks, Albanians (not to mention Germans) have come and seen and been evicted. The greatest modern poet with Peloponnesian connections was Yiannis Ritsos, who died in 1998. He might have won the Nobel Prize if he had not been a communist. He was also an aristocrat whose home was Monemvasia, on the Aegean flank of the Mani. It is a great hump of rock which seems to be shrugging off the houses that cling to its southern flank. Nowadays, what was, in its great days, an island can be reached across a narrow causeway from the mainland. You park outside the thick walls and go through a tight gatehouse to reach the pinched and elongated main street, now named after Yanni Ritsos. Monemvasia means simply "only one way in". Like the eurozone, there is no known way out of it.  

The cliffs that rise above the city seemed, in the sunset, to be streaked with blood. Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Venetians, Normans and Albanians fought and died for mastery of the Kastron, the impregnable — now abandoned — upper city. Monemvasia does its best to seem to belong to one more welcome-matted souvenirville, but the city's history — like that of so many in Greece — is one of rise and fall, massacre and betrayal. Monemvasia has no ancient history and no recorded inhabitants until the 6th century AD. It then became a sanctuary for refugees from Sparta, which had been overrun by invaders from the north. The first church, in the lower city, was dedicated to Christos Elkomenos (Christ-in-chains). Later Monemvasiots made a rich success of their bleak bastion. By the 12th century, it was a tempting target for the Normans, under Roger II, who cruised into its waters after they had colonised (and beautified) Sicily. Roger's fleet "encountered men who were not ignorant of the love of freedom" and was beaten off. 

Monemvasia became too prosperous for its own good. Walking from end to end of today's lower city, past ruined houses, it is hard to imagine that the place once harboured a fleet big enough to dominate large areas of the Mediterranean, all the way to the Pillars of Heracles and that other burly rock, Gibraltar. The elegant central square bears witness, like the fortress on the island's roof, to the long presence of Venetian governors. Although the Turks were a perennial threat, they took Monemvasia only after the Venetians were forced to concede the lease as a result of  losing a distant battle.There were two great sieges, one of the Greeks by the Turks, in 1539, and one the other way round, in 1821.

It's a good test of stamina to climb up the long rocky way to the ruined Venetian battlements and the dilapidated Byzantine church on the peak of the island. There are no great treasures in Monemvasia. It is the treasure. You need to bring your imagination to refill the place with the swirl of medieval life and to see the city's ships setting off for Cythera and Crete, just over the horizon, and Constantine Cavafy's Alexandria, just over the next one. Or you can just sit up there and listen to Ritsos, who plaits ancient and modern into dramatic monologues. In a wittier world, Greece would be required to repay its debts in poetry. It would almost certainly then claim itself to be owed debts that can never be repaid.  Kai einai sosto: and it's true!