Mesolonghi

The thing that makes Mesolonghi unusual is that it was defended on water.

In 1823 a Chian engineer named Michalis Kokkinis built a polygonal fortification with twenty bastions on the edge of the lagoon, with its moat fed from the lagoon itself. It was almost absurd as a military proposition, and it worked: the Ottoman force under Ibrahim Pasha was held off for months in 1825-6 in one of the most extraordinary sieges of the century. Solomos wrote that his eyes had never seen anything more glorious than this little threshing floor.

When it fell, the defenders were given the choice. Around five hundred of them chose death rather than capture, and walked out to the islet at Tourlida on 10 April 1826 and were shot there. The Garden of Heroes in town holds sixty-nine monuments to the dead of those events, laid out in 1858 and given its present form in 1930.

What is left is a low, lagoon-side town with a real waterfront, salt pans, stilt fishermen's houses on stilts out in the water, and mountains across the gulf. It is not a resort and it does not pretend otherwise. But it has one distinction nobody else in Greece has: the only non-state salt works in the country, producing fleur de sel, and a wetland where more than two hundred bird species come in winter.

The straits between the Gulf of Patras and the Ionian were crossed from antiquity, and Naupactus, at the Corinthian end, is the one ancient town of consequence here — Stephanus derives its name from the shipbuilding of the Heraclidae, which even he hedges by offering the rival explanation that the Locrians had built ships there before them.

The modern town is the creation of the Greek revolution. Mesolonghi had been a small settlement in Ottoman times; what it became was a fortress, a siege, and a name that in Greece means unselfish courage of a particular kind. The events of 1822-26 put it in European literature as much as Greek: Lord Byron died at Mesolonghi in 1824, aged thirty-six, on the causeway he had come to help defend, and is commemorated in the Garden of Heroes.

After independence the town was rebuilt on the lagoon side of the channel, and the Aitoliko causeway — the Dardanelles of Greece, as the straits are called — was built in 1885 to link it to the islet. The surrounding lagoons were formed by the deltas of the Acheloos and the Evinos, and the wetlands are now a Ramsar site and a Natura 2000 area.

The Xenokrateion, the town's archaeological museum, opened in December 2021 in an 1885-89 neoclassical building that had been a girls' school, and holds some twelve hundred objects from the prehistoric period to Late Antiquity — including three Proto-Geometric bronze cauldrons from the cemetery at Stamna, which are among the earliest large bronze vessels known anywhere.

Mesolonghi is a coast town and the beaches and water are the reason to come.

Tourlida, the islet about five kilometres south across the causeway, is the signature beach: flat, shallow, with the salt-pan landscape behind it and the stilt houses standing in the water. It is also where the sunset is. Agia Triada, about two kilometres south-east of the centre, is a natural black-mud spa in the lagoon by the islet of Kleisova.

The best actual sand is further out along the Acheloos. Dioni, about sixteen kilometres north via Katochi, is a long shallow beach good for families and for windsurfing, with Mikri Vigla next along. Tsimari, the same Acheloos mouth but further out, is the serious one: Greece's great flat-water kitesurfing lagoon, with wading depth and almost no services. And Louros, out towards Neochori, is a beach of about seventeen kilometres of sand and dunes, backed by the wetland that dams the lagoon.

Around the town itself: Aitoliko at about twelve kilometres is a lagoon town with its own salt pyramids and is the nearest genuinely different place to go. Katochi is the turn-off for the Acheloos beaches. Gouria, Lesini, Mastro and Pentalofou are the villages of the Oiniades unit. The mountains change the light: Arakynthos and Zygos rise immediately behind the town, and Klokova stands across the gulf.

Mesolonghi is a lagoon town and the food follows the water, but unusually for Greece the star is not the fish.

The salt is the thing. The local salt carries around fourteen hundred recorded uses in the cooking of the region, and the fleur de sel made at the works here is the only one in Greece. What that produces is a distinctly saline, sharp cooking tradition rather than the usual heavy frying, and you will taste it.

Alongside that: the eel and the roe from Tourlida, which is a genuinely local and much-sought-after thing, the lagoon fish, and the wine of the region. The town is small enough that the good places are easy to find and the produce is what arrives that morning.

Ask what came out of the salt pans that day, and whether the salt on the table is the local one. It usually is, and it makes a difference.

The lagoon and the birds decide the season. From October to March the wetlands are at their fullest and more than two hundred bird species are on the water, which is the main reason to come. April to June is the best overall: mild, good for the causeway and the beaches, and the salt works are open. July and August is hot and crowded on the Tourlida causeway but the water is fine. Spring is quiet and the lagoon is still high. Avoid the peak of the August heat on the exposed causeway, which has very little shade.

Mesolonghi lies about 35 km from Patras and is best reached by car from there, or by bus from Agrinio. The town sits on the Gulf of Patras lagoon, and the causeway out to Tourlida is a proper road that can be driven or walked.

A car is worth having for Aitoliko, Nea Pleuron and the Acheloos beaches, none of which are otherwise well served. The causeway to Tourlida is a proper road and you can drive or walk it; go towards sunset and bring something for the mosquitoes, which are genuine on the lagoon at dusk. The salt works may only be visited with arrangement — check locally. The Garden of Heroes is the one site that deserves proper time. And if you are coming in winter for the birds, book in Patras rather than Mesolonghi, where accommodation is much thinner.