Paliachora, Aegina: The Byzantine and Post-Byzantine hidden town, church by church

Above the modern monastery of Agios Nektarios, on a hill overlooking Aegina town and the Saronic Gulf, a scatter of roofless churches marks the site of an entire abandoned town. This is Paliachora, sometimes written Palaiochora or Paleochora — Aegina’s main settlement for close to nine hundred years, nicknamed the “Mystras of the Saronic Gulf.” Thirty-five churches still stand on the hillside today, and it is tempting, walking among them, to call the whole site Byzantine. The reality refects a more complicated – and tragic – history. In fact, very few of the churches preserved on the hill of Paliachora date from before the middle of the 15th century. This guide decrypts for you what is genuinely Byzantine and medieval, from the much larger, later layer of Venetian and Ottoman-period rebuilding that makes up most of what you actually see.

Getting there

Paliachora sits inland, in the north of Aegina, on a hill rising to 355 meters — a location chosen precisely because it could not be seen from the sea. The easiest approach is from the monastery of Agios Nektarios, a major pilgrimage site in its own right, a short drive or taxi ride from Aegina town; a signposted path climbs from there into the ruins. There is no entrance fee and no fixed opening hours, since the site is an open hillside rather than an enclosed archaeological park, but it is exposed and shadeless — go with water, sturdy shoes, and, in summer, an early start.

Visiting Paliachora today

Most of what a visitor actually walks through and photographs at Paliachora — the standing walls, the great majority of its 35 churches, the layered defensive rings of the castle — dates from the 15th century onward, and much of it from the 17th and 18th. The Byzantine period gave the site its reason for existing and its earliest core, but left comparatively little of what is physically visible today: that is mostly the product of Venetian money, repeated Ottoman and Venetian destruction, and repeated rebuilding after each one. If it’s specifically the Byzantine period you want to see, the churches and features worth deliberately seeking out are the Bryennios inscription of 1292–93 on the acropolis (built into a later, Venetian-period church), the Taxiarchs below the castle, and Panagia Episkopi. For the Frankish and Catalan period that followed, Panagia Yannouli, Agios Ioannis Theologos, and Agios Georgios Katholikos are all worth the detour, and — outside the walls, near the Mesagros road — Agios Nikolaos of the Mavrikas family, whose fresco layers alone span the 13th to the 16th century.

Byzantine origins: why the town exists

Paliachora’s earliest story is genuinely unknown. The Aeginetans most likely began settling this steep, inland hill toward the end of the 9th century, after repeated raids by Arab pirates made the island’s coastal town untenable. The site itself was not new: Early Christian marble architectural fragments found there point to continuous building activity going back to antiquity, so the 9th-century settlers were reoccupying and building over ground that already had a long history, not founding a town from nothing. Two natural springs near the site of the later castle, together with wells, cisterns, and natural rock-cut reservoirs known locally as souvales, secured a reliable water supply — a decisive practical advantage for a hilltop refuge.

It is worth stating plainly what the sources do, and do not, tell us about the centuries that followed. No direct documentary evidence survives from the Middle Byzantine period down to 1204, and very few of the 35 churches still standing on the hill today date from before the middle of the 15th century. In other words: Paliachora’s founding and its earliest purpose belong squarely to Byzantium, but most of what a visitor actually sees standing on the hillside was built, rebuilt, or repainted long after Byzantine rule over the island had ended.

After Byzantium: the castle and five centuries of sieges

Byzantine rule ended in 1204. What followed immediately was not Catalan, and it’s worth being precise about the century in between. After the Fourth Crusade and the Partitio Romaniae that divided up Byzantine territory, Aegina was assigned to Venice on paper — but control passed almost at once to Frankish lords, specifically the barons of Karystos, on nearby Euboea, who held the island as part of the wider Duchy of Athens rather than as Venetian territory in practice. Aegina stayed under this Karystos line for most of the 13th century, with little individually recorded about the island itself in this stretch. The chain that eventually brought the Catalans in ran through marriage, not conquest: in 1296, the Veronese knight Boniface of Verona married Agnes de Cicon, daughter of the baron of Karystos and Aegina, and received the island as part of her dowry. It was their daughter, Marulla, whose own marriage in 1317 to Alfonso Fadrique (Alfons Frederic) — an illegitimate son of King Frederick II of Sicily and a commander of the Catalan Company, who went on to become Vicar General of the Duchy of Athens — finally brought Aegina into Catalan hands.

His descendants ruled Aegina for most of the 14th century, until the island passed, again by marriage, to the Caupena family, who held it under the Crown of Aragon until 1451 — a genuine Catalan lordship of well over a century, and, as the churches described below show, an artistically productive one, not merely a military occupation.

Paliachora’s stone castle was built in 1462, during the first period of Venetian rule over Aegina (1451–1540), and some sources tie its funding to the skull relic of St. George, kept at Agios Georgios Katholikos, as though the relic were handed straight to Venice in exchange for construction money. The relic’s actual, well-documented history is longer and stranger than that. It originated in the treasury of the Imperial Palace in Constantinople and was very likely carried off during the Fourth Crusade by Othon de la Roche, the first Latin Duke of Athens, ending up at the castle of Livadia, in Boeotia — itself under Catalan rule from 1311 to 1381. The last Frankish Duke of Athens, Gautier V de Brienne, left money to St. George’s church in Livadia in his will, written five days before his death at the Battle of Cephissus in 1311, against the Catalan Company. The relic had reached Aegina, and Agios Georgios Katholikos specifically, by at least 1394. Over the following century, the kings of Aragon wanted it badly and failed repeatedly to get it: Pere el Cerimoniós sent unsuccessful letters in 1354, 1355, and 1381; his son Joan I tried again in 1393, writing from Valencia to three different intermediaries, and failed again. By 1399 the relic was in the hands of Aliot de Caupena, then lord of Aegina, who also refused to hand it over despite further royal letters in 1402 and 1409. It was finally taken, under threat, by the corsair Bernat de Vilamarí on the orders of King Alfons V “the Magnanimous” — and even then, according to a 17th-century account in the Acta Sanctorum, the relic reportedly vanished from Vilamarí’s ship during a storm and was found back in its sanctuary on Aegina, only leaving Greece for good when the Venetian Senate formally ordered it moved to Venice in 1492, three decades after the castle itself was built. It has remained at the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice ever since (a fragment was given back to Catalonia in 1981, to the Chapel of Sant Jordi at the Generalitat in Barcelona). We flag this plainly: the popular “castle built in exchange for the relic” story does not match this better-documented timeline, and we’ve kept the more heavily sourced version here. Whatever its exact connection to the relic, the castle’s construction was funded by Venice, and every noble family of Paliachora is said to have received 100 ducats from these funds, money used to fortify the summit of the hill.

The fortress did not save the town from catastrophe. In 1537, Suleiman the Magnificent sent the corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa to destroy Venetian bases across Greece in retaliation against the Republic; Barbarossa took Paliachora and left nothing standing. The following year, the French Baron Blancard visited and found not a single living soul. In 1540 Venice formally ceded Aegina to the Ottomans, and the town began to be rebuilt almost immediately: churches were repaired, new houses went up, and by 1555, when the French traveler André Thevet passed through, Paliachora was reconstructed and well inhabited again.

In 1654, disaster struck a second time. The Venetian senate sent the admiral Francesco Morosini to clear the Aegean archipelago of piracy — in which Aegina’s own inhabitants had become entangled — and when the island did not surrender easily, Morosini captured Paliachora, badly damaged its fortifications, plundered and destroyed the town, and carried off a number of its people as prisoners of war. When the English traveler George Wheler visited in 1676, little remained standing inside the castle beyond five cisterns, sixty houses, and the twin church of Agios Georgios and Agios Dimitrios described below, though he reports some 800 houses, mostly ruined, surviving in the wider settlement outside the citadel.

A second period of Venetian rule, from 1687 to 1715, brought a real if partial recovery. A second, longer period of Ottoman rule followed, from 1715 to 1825, with mixed fortunes: at one point, an Ottoman traveler gave an admiring account of the fortress and its roughly 500 surviving stone houses, most belonging to the town’s non-Muslim (reaya) population.

By the early 19th century, the picture had turned decisively bleak. In 1817, the French officer and traveler Puillon de Boblaye described Paliachora as ruined, with only around 80 houses remaining; by 1830, the British traveler Thomas Abercromby Trant found the settlement entirely abandoned. After Greek independence, the town’s last remaining residents moved down to Aegina’s ancient coastal capital — which, only a few years earlier, had briefly served as the first capital of the modern Greek state, from 1826 to 1828.

Against that backdrop of relic ransoms, sieges, and repeated rebuilding, the handful of buildings below matter precisely because they are the exceptions — what can still be traced back to Paliachora’s Byzantine beginnings, underneath everything that came after.

The genuinely Byzantine monuments

These are the buildings at Paliachora with a documented or architecturally clear connection to the Byzantine period — mostly the late 13th century, when the island was nominally under Frankish rule but its churches were still being built, inscribed, and endowed by families of unmistakably Byzantine background.

The twin church of Agios Georgios and Agios Dimitrios, and the Bryennios inscription

On Paliachora’s acropolis, alongside the remains of a water reservoir and traces of settlement, stands a twin-aisled church known today as Agios Georgios and Agios Dimitrios. Built into its exterior south wall is a marble inscription dated 1292–1293, recording the erection of “the venerable church of the Archangel Michael” by a patron named Konstantinos Bryennios. The Bryennioi were one of the great aristocratic families of the Byzantine world; their presence on Aegina nearly a century after the Fourth Crusade is strong evidence that prominent Byzantine families continued to live on the island, or kept ties to it, despite Frankish rule. The same conclusion follows from an almost exactly contemporary case: the Samalas, or Zygomalas, family name inscribed at Omorphi Ekklisia in Aegina town, just three or four years earlier, in 1289. This inscription is likely a spolia coming from another church of Paliachora, the church of the Taxiarchs.

The Church of the Taxiarchs, below the castle

Not to be confused with the Church of the Taxiarchs on Mount Oros, a separate building also on Aegina, with its own dedicated article. Both share the same dedication, to the Archangels, but are different churches in different parts of the island.

Panagia Episkopi (Agios Dionysios)

On the hill’s west slopes stands the church known today as Agios Dionysios, or Panagia Episkopi. Its present form is a long, narrow, domed church with a single side aisle, but the building’s earlier history is more interesting than its current shape suggests. Strong morphological evidence points to an original phase, before the 14th century, as a tetrastyle domed cross-in-square church — a genuinely Middle or Late Byzantine architectural type. Three niches in the present east wall likely correspond to the sanctuary apse, prothesis, and diakonikon of that original building, and of the four columns that once supported the dome, only the eastern pair survive in place; the present elliptical dome now rests on a rectangle measuring just 2.6 by 3.4 meters. At some point, probably following a structural collapse, the church was converted into its current three-aisled form; its original west aisle no longer survives, its site now occupied by an open viewing balcony.

In the 18th century the church was rededicated to St. Dionysios, Metropolitan of Aegina from 1576 to 1579 and canonized in 1703; most of the paintings visible today date from the 1610 restoration, not from the church’s Byzantine origin.

The Frankish period (1205–1317) and Catalan period (1317–1451): Byzantine art under Western rule

Between Byzantium’s fall in 1204 and the Ottoman conquest, Aegina spent roughly two and a half centuries under Western rule — first Frankish, via the barons of Karystos, then Catalan, from 1317 to 1451. The 14th century in particular, under the Fadrique family and their Caupena successors, was Paliachora’s single most active building period, and one where the traditional “Byzantine vs. post-Byzantine” split breaks down a little. These churches were built well after 1204, by patrons and painters working for Frankish or Catalan lords, yet the people who built, funded, and worshipped in them were the local Orthodox population, working largely in a Byzantine architectural and artistic idiom. We’ve grouped them separately from both the Byzantine core above and the largely undocumented post-Byzantine churches below, because the evidence here is genuinely rich enough to treat on its own terms. At least two further churches of this period — Hagios Ioannis Prodromos and Hagios Efthymios — are named in the sources as among the most elaborate built under Catalan rule, with frescoes surviving from the same century, but without enough further published detail for an entry of their own here.

Agios Georgios Katholikos (Panagia Phoritissa)

This church dominates Paliachora’s only square, known as Phorou (or “forum”) square — the settlement’s marketplace, from which the church’s alternative name, Panagia Phoritissa, derives. Specialist scholarship on the Catalan period dates the building itself to the 14th century, among the most elaborate churches raised under the Fadrique family, with frescoes surviving from that same century — though its wall paintings, discussed below, also include much later phases. It is a simple, aisleless building, roughly 11 by 4 meters inside, covered by a slightly pointed barrel vault reinforced with two strainer arches. An inscription carved into a poros slab above the entrance records a later inspection, carried out in April 1533 by the Venetian governor of Nafplio, Antonio Barbaro.

Agios Ioannis Theologos

South of the acropolis, this domed cruciform church, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist (“the Theologian”), is one of the best-documented buildings of the Catalan period. A carved votive inscription, now in the Aegina Archaeological Museum, records that it was built by a “Count Pere” asking forgiveness for his sins — almost certainly Pere I Frederic, Count of Salona and lord of Aegina from 1338 to 1355. A separate document from the papal chancery at Avignon, dated 1350, names Pere’s younger brother Joan Frederic as lord of Aegina and Salamis by that year, suggesting Pere may have handed the island’s governance to him around then; on that basis, the church is generally dated to 1338–1350.

A note on the votive inscription itself: not every specialist accepts the Catalan reading given above. A 2016 palaeographic study of the same stone — comparing its letter-forms to dated 9th-century inscriptions from Thrace and Asia Minor — argues instead that the lettering predates the rise of the Macedonian dynasty in 867, two to three centuries earlier than the Fadrique identification. On that reading, “Komes Petros” is not a Catalan count at all, but a genuine Middle Byzantine naval officer, and the inscription has nothing to do with Pere Frederic. The same study is careful about the limits of its own case: the stone shows signs of reuse, no excavation has confirmed an earlier building beneath the standing. This is a live, unresolved disagreement among specialists over a stone anyone can go and look at in the Aegina Archaeological Museum. Click here to learn more about this scholarly debate.

Its west portal carries a carved lintel with three discs: two sun-like rosettes at the ends and, at the center, a cross of the type used by the Catalan military Order of Montesa, founded in 1317. Between the cross and the rosettes, two carved shapes usually read as angels’ wings have been argued instead to represent a pair of double battle-axes — the signature weapon of the Catalan Company’s light infantry, the Almogàvers, famous (and feared) for using them to bring down mounted knights in battles such as Gallipoli and Cephissus. Read together with the donor’s plea for forgiveness, the lintel has been interpreted as a double message: a proud reminder of Catalan military power in Greece, and a quiet act of atonement — the Catalan Company’s leadership, Pere Frederic included, had been excommunicated by the Latin Church in 1335 and accused of piracy by Venice in 1350. Inside, a fresco of St. George on horseback slaying the dragon, contemporary with the church’s construction, echoes the same equestrian imagery used across Catalan-period Aegina as something close to a house symbol of Catalan military identity.

Panagia Yannouli

A small, ruined two-aisled church on the path up from the site entrance, Panagia Yannouli is dated by specialists to the 13th century — but on reflection, we’d placed it in the wrong section: a 13th-century date here falls within the Frankish period, after 1204, not before it, so despite its early date this is not a Byzantine-period building in the sense the rest of this section means. It belongs with the churches of Western rule instead.

Its two-aisled plan is itself informative. Panagia Yannouli is cited in the specialist literature as an example of a “double church,” a type built or adapted at several points in Paliachora’s medieval history — alongside Agios Efthymios (the only double church specifically built during the Catalan period), and, from the later Venetian period, the twin churches of Agia Kyriaki and Zoodochos Pigi, and Agios Georgios and Agios Dimitrios in the castle. Scholars have suggested these paired naves served a genuine dual liturgical function, allowing Catholic and Orthodox communities to share a single building for their separate rites and devotions during the long period of Latin and Catalan rule — a small architectural trace of two religious communities finding a practical way to coexist under the same roof.

Agios Nikolaos “of the Mavrikas family”

Aegina has at least three churches called Agios Nikolaos: this one, outside Paliachora’s walls near the Aegina–Mesagros road; a separate, minor Agios Nikolaos within the Paliachora settlement itself (see below); and Agios Nikolaos Moulos, near Souvala, covered in our main Byzantine Aegina article.

Outside Paliachora’s settlement proper, on the fringes of the hill next to the modern road to Mesagros, stands a domed cruciform church that belonged to the medieval Mavrikas family of Aegina. Its exterior was noticeably altered, probably in 1522 — changes to the sanctuary, a new west-entrance frame, and the addition of the present, low dome — but its heavy proportions, small window openings, plain rubble masonry, and total absence of decorative architectural sculpture all point to a considerably earlier original building.

The church’s wall paintings are the real draw, and here the sources genuinely disagree, which we think is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The traditional reading, followed in our earlier draft, is three layers: an earliest layer of notably fine quality — a bust of Christ Pantokrator and, in the north arm of the cross, St. George on horseback slaying the dragon — dated by some specialists to the 12th or 13th century; a securely dated layer from 1330 (the Raising of Lazarus, the Birth of the Virgin, Pentecost, the hierarch Basil, a Virgin in supplication); and a final, firmly post-Byzantine layer of 1522 covering the east end and templon. A 2016 academic study of the church’s two dated inscriptions argues instead that the entire painted cycle in the north, south, and east arms — both the “early-looking” Pantokrator and St. George, and the securely dated 1330 scenes — was executed in a single campaign in 1330, by two painters working together, rather than in two separate phases centuries apart. The 1330 date itself is solid: both inscriptions name the same year and the same overlord, “Don Alfonso, son of King Frederick” — Alfons Frederic, Catalan lord of Aegina from 1317 to 1338 — and one names the painter responsible for the Deesis Virgin and St. Basil images as Georgios Aras. On this reading, only the 1522 layer at the church’s east end is genuinely post-Byzantine; the rest belongs to a single, dateable moment in the Catalan period. We present both readings rather than pick one, since the disagreement is real and unresolved in the published literature.

Whichever reading is correct, the 1330 inscription is a striking document in its own right: it was commissioned by a priest and three local laymen with their families — members of the Orthodox community — and it names their Catalan overlord by title, in Greek, on the wall of their own parish church. Read alongside the Omorphi Ekklisia inscription of 1289, which instead names the Byzantine emperor and patriarch in Constantinople, the two together trace a real shift in local political loyalty across just four decades: from nostalgia for a distant Byzantine center, to public acknowledgment of the new Catalan lord actually ruling the island.

Taken together, this church’s decoration spans at least two centuries, whether as a long Byzantine-to-Venetian sequence or a single 1330 campaign followed by a 16th-century post-Byzantine finish — combined with two rare dated inscriptions (1330 and 1522), it is arguably the single richest documented monument at Paliachora, and our strongest recommendation for a dedicated article.

The post-Byzantine churches

The remaining churches at Paliachora make up the great majority of what still stands on the hill — the Venetian and Ottoman-period core the sources are explicit about. We don’t have, and don’t need, the same level of individual dating for each of these; a brief, honest mention of what each one is and what, if anything, survives of its decoration is enough.

The walking route up from the site entrance passes the Church of the Stavros, where the main path begins. At the easternmost point of the site, the monastery complex of Agia Kyriaki — its twin churches of Agia Kyriaki and Zoodochos Pigi built into the fortification’s east wing — is squarely post-Byzantine: a 2003 excavation, based on glazed pottery and Frankish coins, dated the earliest surviving building phase to the second half of the 15th century, “already out of the Byzantine timeframe,” in the excavators’ own words. Its wall paintings date to the 17th century (Agia Kyriaki) and after 1589 (Zoodochos Pigi); the monastery’s katholikon survived in good condition because it remained in use until 1803. Just outside the walls to the east, a small cemetery church of the Archangel Michael carries reused Frankish-period sculpture around its south entrance, decorated with crosses and Solomon’s-knot motifs. The twin church of Agios Georgios and Agios Dimitrios on the acropolis, discussed above for the Byzantine-period inscription it carries as spolia, is itself a building of this same Venetian period.

South of the acropolis, the domed cruciform church of Agios Ioannis Theologos was probably built during the period of Catalan rule over Aegina (broadly the first half of the 14th century) — firmly a Frankish-era, not a Byzantine, building, whatever its Byzantine-derived architectural style. A cluster of small, plain, aisleless barrel-vaulted churches rounds out the hillside without much individual documentation: Agios Eleftherios, Agios Minas, Agia Markrina, a modest Agios Nikolaos and Agios Efthymios and Agios Dimitrios within the settlement itself (distinct from the Mavrikas church of the same name discussed above), and, further downhill to the southwest, Agios Athanasios and the two-aisled Agios Charalambos.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• “Paleochora of Aegina,” Kastra.eu (Greek Castles).
• Manuel Antonio Castiñeiras González, “Paliachora (Egina), el Sinaí y Cataluña a finales del siglo XIV: hibridación artística, política y peregrinación en el Mediterráneo Oriental,” in Imagens e Liturgia na Idade Média, 5, C. Varela Fernandes (ed.), Secretariado Nacional dos Bens Culturais da Igreja, Lisbon, 2016, pp. 9–56.
• Charalambos Pennas, Byzantine Aigina, Athens, 2005.
• Xeni Petritou-Triantafillou, Paleochora – The Medieval Acropolis of Aegina, Perpinia Publications, Athens, 2011.
• Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “Reconsidering a Byzantine Inscription from Aegina,” in Christos Stavrakos (ed.), Inscriptions in the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine History and History of Art, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016, pp. 253–278.