Katakolo

Katakolo is a small port town on the Ionian Sea coast of Elis, in the western Peloponnese, about 11 kilometres from the larger town of Pyrgos. It is a modest place, and the 2021 census recorded only 511 residents, but its harbour is one of the busiest in Greece, because it is the closest deep-water port to Ancient Olympia, sanctuary of Zeus and birthplace of the Olympic Games in 776 BC.

A Small Town on a Working Headland

The town sits on a headland that separates the Gulf of Kyparissia from the open Ionian, which is what gives it both shelter and a usable depth of water. Its permanent population has been slowly shrinking, from 594 in 1991 and 601 in 2001 to 513 in 2011 and 511 in 2021, yet the waterfront carries more than sixty shops, almost all of them aimed at visitors who step ashore for a few hours. A working lighthouse, built in 1865, still marks the point, and a railway line, opened in 1882 by the Pyrgos-Katakolo Railway Company, has long linked the port to Pyrgos and on to Olympia. Because Olympia has no port of its own, most travellers arriving by sea pass through Katakolo, which is why it remains a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Greece along the western Peloponnese coast.

Pontikokastro and the Sunken City of Pheia

The headland above the harbour carries the ruins of Pontikokastro, a fortress originally built by the Byzantines and seized by Frankish crusaders around 1205, who knew it as Beauvoir or Belveder. It is largely collapsed and its original plan can only be guessed at, but the climb is short and the coastal view is reason enough to make it. Below the same promontory lie remains of something far older. Pheia, the ancient port of Elis, stood on the isthmus joining the promontory of Ichthys, today's Cape Katakolo, to the mainland; Homer names it in the Iliad, and Thucydides records that an Athenian fleet landed there in 431 BC, the first year of the Peloponnesian War, and laid waste the surrounding country. The town was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 551 AD, the same event that wrecked Patras and damaged the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Excavation began in 1911, and underwater work from 1959 onward has recovered material at about 5 metres depth, including Cycladic marble figurines, a Late Archaic kouros, amphorae and Roman and Byzantine finds.

The Road to Ancient Olympia

Olympia lies roughly 30 kilometres inland by road, reached through Pyrgos, and it is the reason almost everyone comes. The sanctuary was Panhellenic and dedicated principally to Zeus, and its oldest major building, the temple of Hera, went up around 600 BC. The great Temple of Zeus followed in the mid-fifth century BC and housed the gold and ivory statue by Pheidias counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The games ran until the last recorded Olympiad in 393 AD, ended under Theodosius I. German archaeologists have worked the site since 1875, beginning under Ernst Curtius, and have recovered some 14,000 objects, most of them now in the site museum; the sanctuary was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1989. The Olympic flame for each modern games is still lit here, at the temple of Hera, using a parabolic mirror.

What There Is to See in Katakolo Itself

In town, the Museum of Ancient Greek Technology reconstructs mechanisms and devices described by ancient Greek writers, giving visitors something to see in Katakolo before or after the trip inland. Founded by the engineer Kostas Kotsanas, it holds around 200 working models of inventions dated between 2000 BC and 100 AD, from hydraulic clocks and automatic temple doors to a reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism. Beyond the museum and the castle there is little more than long sandy beaches either side of the cape and a row of tavernas along the quay, which on a day with no cruise ship alongside is precisely the appeal.