A Greece for all seasons: my autumn roadtrip through the Peloponnese

An out-of-season journey through the peninsula reveals Byzantine villages, deserted beaches and friendly tavernas

As I drove across the causeway which links the tiny fortress island of Monemvasia to the south-eastern coast of the Peloponnese, the Aegean sparkling on all sides, I recalled a line by Yiannis Ritsos, one of Greece’s greatest 20th-century poets. Ritsos lived in Monemvasia, in a house that is today a museum on a cobble-stretch by the tawny castle walls. A favourite passage goes: “The voyage is neither a leave-taking nor a home-coming – an ethereal bridge …”

The excuse for my trip to the Peloponnese’s deep south – Messinia, the Mani, and Laconia – fell between those two ideas. My mother has roots in the Peloponnese – a sort-of homecoming that I’ve long wanted to explore – and with the summer over and greedy for an adventure to myself, I set out by car, leaving Kalamata, the leafy port city and gateway to the area, on a coastal road circuit.

Autumn in the Peloponnese is another Greece. Forget the Cycladic white and blue; mountain valleys are carpeted in pine forests and wildflowers, a great stretch of green studded with rustic limestone houses. These villages, relieved by the end of a scorching summer, celebrate boisterous harvest festivals for wines, oranges and chestnuts in Laconia, figs in Messinia, and olives near Kalamata. This is the Greece the diaspora yearns for: the chorio – a word that snaps us back to our relatives and Greek rural life, villages where the air is healthy, eating depends on what is grown metres away, and tavernas are alive with locals rather than tourists. In the shoulder season, the weather is cool enough for long walks along the region’s spectacular trails but, at about 25C, is also still good for swimming.