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Ancient Sparta. The decisive Greek victory at Plataea put an end to the Greco-Persian War along with Persian ambitions to expand into Europe. Even though this war was won by a pan-Greek army, credit was given to Sparta, who besides providing the leading forces at Thermopylae and Plataea, had been the de facto leader of the entire Greek ...
Eurotas River. According to myth, the first king of the region later to be called Laconia, but then called Lelegia was the eponymous King Lelex.He was followed, according to tradition, by a series of kings allegorizing several traits of later-to-be Sparta and Laconia, such as the Kings Myles, Eurotas, Lacedaemon and Amyclas of Sparta.
Sparta (Greek: Σπάρτη, Spárti) is a city and municipality in Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece. It lies at the site of ancient Sparta within the Evrotas Valley . The municipality was merged with six nearby municipalities in 2011, for a total population (as of 2021) of 32,786, of whom 17,773 lived in the city.
After World War II and the Greek Civil War, its population began to somewhat decline, as people moved from the villages toward the larger cities of Greece and abroad. In 1992, a devastating fire ruined the finest olive crops in the northern part of the prefecture, and affected the area of Sellasia along with Oinountas and its surrounding areas.
The city of Sparta lay at the southern end of the central Laconian plain, on the right bank of the Eurotas River. It was a strategic site, guarded on three sides by mountains and controlling the routes by which invading armies could penetrate Laconia and the southern Peloponnesus via the Langhda Pass over Mt Taygetus .
The settlement at ancient Sparta, named Lacedaemonia, continued to exist, although greatly depopulated, until modern times as a town of a few thousand people who lived among the ruins, in the shadow of Mystras. [12] The Palaiologos family (the last Byzantine Greek imperial dynasty) also lived in Mystras.
Mystras remained inhabited throughout the Ottoman period, when Western travellers mistook it for ancient Sparta. In the 1830s, it was abandoned and the new town of Sparta was built, approximately eight kilometres to the east. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the Sparta municipality. [4]
Mesoa (Ancient Greek: Μεσόα), or Messoa (Μεσσόα), was a settlement that existed before the Dorian conquest. It was united with three other such settlements (Pitane, Limnae, and Cynosura) by a common sacrifice to Artemis, [1] and eventually coalesced into ancient Sparta. It is probable that Mesoa was in the southeast part of the city. [2]