Sparta

The thing that catches people out at Sparta is how ordinary the modern town is. It is not a ruin with a town built over it in the romantic sense; it is a tidy planned city of red-tiled roofs, laid out in the 1830s on and around a scatter of classical remains, in a broad olive plain with the snow-dusted Taygetus filling the entire horizon behind it.

What is real, and what you can walk to in an afternoon, is genuine: the ancient theatre cut into the hillside with its stone seating still legible, the low foundations of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in a meadow of wildflowers, and the Menelaion on its knoll above the Eurotas, a few hundred metres from where Helen and Menelaus were supposed to have lived. The Leonidaion, the officers' mess where modern Greeks still hold a formal dinner once a year, is half a kilometre north of the town centre.

The really serious thing nearby is not Sparta at all — it is Mystras, two kilometres east, the capital of the Frankish Despotate of the Morea and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is one of the best-preserved Byzantine cities in the world and it is almost always overlooked, because people come for Sparta and stay for Sparta.

And then there is Thermopylae, which was fought for by Sparta and is not actually in it — the pass is about seventy kilometres north, up in Phthiotis.

The ancient city was destroyed in 396 AD by the Visigoths under Alaric, and that is the moment the story effectively stops. What stood afterwards was Roman Sparta, a provincial town with a deliberately respectable Greek veneer, and then Byzantine Sparta.

The modern city was founded in 1834, laid out on and around the few ruins that survived. That is a real founding, not a tourist fiction, and it means the classical remains are embedded in ordinary streets rather than isolated in a site.

Between them lie the periods most visitors skip: the Roman town, which was granted the right to hold a festival under Caracalla; the Frankish and then Ottoman periods, when Laconia was a producing region whose silk and wine were worth the trouble; and the nineteenth-century philhellene moment, when the Bavarian monarchy moved the capital of Greece from Nafplio to Athens in 1834 and left the Peloponnese to be administered separately.

Around the modern town is the ancient land: Amyclae, absorbed into classical Sparta and now a suburb with a church on the acropolis; Skoura and Platanes, the villages standing on the plain where Pitana and Skoura were; and Karyes and Geraki, high in the Menala mountains on the old road to Arachova.

The name is recorded by Stephanus of Byzantium in the sixth century AD. His Ethnica is not a book of stories but a dictionary of Greek place-names, and for this one it says: "It is named from the Spartoi who came with Cadmus". "Timagoras says that, having fallen out there into Laconia, they named it Sparta from themselves". (Ethnica, s.v. Σπάρτη).

That is the whole of what an ancient source has to say about how the place got its name. It is a shorter answer than the guidebooks give, and it is the only one with a source behind it.

Sparta has no seafront. This is the single most important thing to know about it: the modern town is about thirty-five kilometres inland, its ancient city was well inland too, and its old port of Gytheio is over forty kilometres away down the Laconian Gulf. Do not book it as a coastal base.

The reason to come is that the two best sites in the region are both within a few kilometres. Mystras, at about two kilometres east, is the Byzantine capital of the Despotate of the Morea and a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it deserves half a day on its own — the churches on the hill, the great columns, the frescoes. It is the most commonly missed site of its quality in Greece, because almost everyone comes for Sparta and stays for Sparta.

Closer in: Amyclae, where the church of San Giorgio stands on the acropolis of the ancient town; Skoura and Platanes, the modern villages standing on the plain where Pitana and Skoura were; and Sellasia, up at the northern pass to the Argolid.

Higher and further: the Menala mountains, with Karyes and Geraki, and the road north over the pass that has been the invasion route from the north since 480 BC — which is why Thermopylae is on it. Kamena Vourla and Monemvasia, if you want coast, are further afield along the Laconian and Mani shores.

Laconia has one very famous product and a genuinely good regional kitchen underneath it.

The famous one is the Sparta orange, a small, bitter, thin-skinned citrus that does not travel and is essentially a Laconian speciality — you will find it in fruit and in local honey, and it is worth trying if you are there in season.

Underneath that it is inland Peloponnese cooking: grilled lamb over charcoal, pies, stuffed vegetables, and the smoked meats and sausages of the Mani and the mountain villages. The strong local cheeses are good, and the olive oil is excellent, because the Eurotas plain is the flattest and most fertile ground in the Peloponnese.

Eat in the modern town rather than in the ancient site area, and try whatever the orange has gone into — the honey first of all.

Spring, from April into May, is the best time: Taygetus still has snow on it while the valley is green and the wildflowers are out around Artemis Orthia. September and October are also very good and quieter. July and August are hot on the flat, though the mountains and Mystras remain fine in the afternoon. December to February is cold, with snow on Taygetus being the normal condition rather than an event — and it is the reason the plain, which stays green, is such a contrast.

Sparta lies about two and a half hours from Athens by road or by bus on the A7. There are buses on to Kalamata, so the town can be reached without a car.

Rent a car: Mystras, Amyclae and the mountain villages are all easier to reach that way. Go to Mystras early — the churches are beautiful but the walk up is steep and there is little shade at midday. In Sparta itself, allow a morning for the ancient site on foot, which is not large but needs a couple of hours with the Menelaion and the theatre. If you are driving to Thermopylae, allow a full morning — the pass, the Leonidas statue and the hot springs are all separated by several kilometres and the road is slow. And do not plan a swim: the sea is a separate trip.