Abstract
The Mani peninsula is a semi-arid landscape with few natural sources of fresh water, yet it supported a dense population during the Late Byzantine and Ottoman periods. This paper reviews the archaeological and historical evidence for water management practices in Mani, concentrating on its domestic-scale hydraulic infrastructure (cisterns and saltpans) and the ports and harbours along its coasts. The data point to a critical shift in household-level social organization at the turn of the 18th century, underscoring the fact that people living in supposedly ‘peripheral’ regions like Mani nevertheless engaged in far-reaching networks of contact and exchange.
Highlights
When the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor first visited the Mani peninsula in the 1950s, he imagined he was stepping into a version of Greece’s past where modernity had not yet eased the difficult way of life in the remote countryside
This study examines the relationship between water resource management and household-scale social organization in the Mani peninsula, where a shift in water-related social practice can be discerned around the turn of the 18th century
The cisterns required an extraordinary investment of time and resources to build, but they were critical tools that enabled the residents to survive the dry summers
Summary
When the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor first visited the Mani peninsula in the 1950s, he imagined he was stepping into a version of Greece’s past where modernity had not yet eased the difficult way of life in the remote countryside. The large number of people living in Mani throughout the post-Medieval period would have quickly over-taxed the few natural fresh water resources and led to an increasing reliance on the sea as a means of obtaining needed supplies It shares a similar climate with the rest of the Peloponnese, Mani’s agricultural productivity is limited by a scarcity of springs, a lack of perennial streams or rivers, and a rocky and mountainous terrain which restricts the amount of arable land to about one-quarter of its area (Kayser and Thompson 1964: Maps 301, 319; Komis 2004: 18; see Yassoglou 2004). An analysis of 18th century records shows that quails from Mani were being exported to the Aegean islands and as far away as Constantinople (Wagstaff 1965: 301–2, 1996: 284)
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