Damalas Castle

Damalas Castle is the acropolis of ancient Troezen, which was also inhabited during the Middle Ages, under Frankish rule. The very ancient settlement was upgraded into a castle for the supervision of the local fief. The castle was built in the 13th century on the ruins of the ancient acropolis of Troezen, and was evidently abandoned when its population moved to the flatter area of the present-day village of Troezen. References to Damalas Castle are very few in the Byzantine period, but not in the era of Frankish rule, when information about the fate of the area, in which it becomes this distinct fief, multiplies.

It is also mentioned in the Aragonese version of the Chronicle of the Morea. It appears to have been used by local Frankish lords. The Barony of Eldamala or Eldamalet (Aragonese: Eldamala) was a medieval statelet-fief subject to the Principality of Achaea; the Castle of Damalas (CASTE DAMALA) is also mentioned in an inscription on a denier tournois (~€3.5) minted by the lord of Chios and baron of Veligosti and Damalas, Martino Zaccaria, between 1325 and 1345 (in an excavation by E. Legrand, Frankish coins from the middle of the 13th century were found in the tower).

The chronicle records that the barony was founded in 1209 after the conquest of the Peloponnese by William of Champlitte, who granted 4 fiefs to Jacques de la Roche, a French knight, in the area of ancient Troezen. The knight built a castle, the "Caste Eldamala", whose name in its Hellenised form became Damalas. The castle was a tower for the control of the fief, and not only that: it was the custom of the time to give such castles the name of the knight who built them. Damalas constituted the medieval continuation of ancient Troezen; it developed in the same place where the ancient city flourished and replaced it as the administrative centre of the wider area.

Machine-translated from “Κάστρο του Δαμαλά” on the Greek Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Damalas Castle ranks #8,061 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #126 of the 134 mapped in Greece. Founded c. 1250, it is older than 69% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 861 atlas entries founded in the 13th century. The nearest day-trip guide is Athens, 63 km away. It is one of the 35 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of the Peloponnese. See how Greece compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Greek) ↗