Venetian Castle of Parga

The castle above Parga has been burned, dismantled and rebuilt three times, and the town beneath it was eventually sold rather than conquered. The fortress sits on the headland between Parga's harbour and Valtos beach, and every side that held it left something behind: Venetian, Ottoman, French and British.

Three fortresses on one hill

This stretch of coast was Thesprotian territory in antiquity, and the small late Hellenistic town of Toryne, whose name means "ladle" in Greek, stood somewhere on it.

The first fortifications went up in the 11th century, built by the people of Parga themselves against pirate raids. The Venetians rebuilt the walls in the 13th century, and in 1401 Parga placed itself under Venetian rule, which lasted until the republic fell in 1797. In 1452 an Ottoman force occupied the town for two years and pulled down part of the castle; in 1537 the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa burned the fortress and the houses inside it. Venice rebuilt it a third time in 1572, and that fortress, the one standing today, was never taken by assault.

Politics finished what sieges could not. Parga passed to the French in 1797, came under nominal Ottoman sovereignty with Russian protection in 1800, returned to the French in 1807 and went to Britain in 1814. In 1817 Britain agreed to hand the town to Ali Pasha of Ioannina for 150,000 pounds. When the transfer took place in 1819, most of the population, some 4,000 people, left for Corfu, carrying the ashes of their dead with them. Ali Pasha then added a hammam and quarters for his harem at the top of the fortress.

The hill mattered because Parga did. The town was Venice's foothold on the Epirus mainland, administered alongside the Ionian islands and facing Corfu across a short stretch of water, at a moment when the whole of the surrounding coast was Ottoman. The castle guarded a harbour that could keep that connection open.

What to look for on the walls

Above the entrance is the winged lion of St Mark, the Venetian mark of ownership, beside an inscription reading ANTONIO BERVASS 1764. Further in, the emblems of Ali Pasha and carved two-headed eagles belong to the Ottoman decades, two building programmes standing a few metres apart. The bathhouse and the ruined harem rooms are at the summit. From the ramparts you look down on the tiled roofs of the town, across to Valtos beach and out to the islet of Panagia and the Ionian.

Visiting

Entry is free, and in summer the castle stays open into the evening. The way up is a stepped lane from the centre of Parga, ten to fifteen minutes of climbing past shops and under cypresses, with a cafe inside the walls at the top. Early morning or the last hour before sunset is the sensible time to go, for the light and for the temperature.

The fortress was built to watch the sea, and it still reads best from that side, where the headland, the walls and the islet line up the way the Venetian engineers saw them; many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Greece coast.