Architectural Details

Water supply. Sufficient potable water is a necessary prerequisite for comfortable life in a town that has no natural springs. During times of siege, ensuring sufficient drinking water became a question of survival. Every private residence therefore had at least one or more cisterns at its disposal. Both the upper and the lower town had additional large public reservoirs for general public use, and for use in emergencies (see plate 35).

All the houses had gutters that drained water into the cisterns; the guttering consisted of the same concave tiles used for the roofs. They were built in at the outside edge of the thick walls. The roofs, therefore, did not jut out, not even in the case of Turkish houses. The Turks changed their style of construction in Monemvasia in light of the need to collect water. The vertical pipes leading to the cisterns consisted of connected conical clay pipes. The reservoir themselves were sealed with reddish Byzantine mortar.

Some of the reservoirs had two compartments, the first of which served as settling tank. From there pipes transferred the settled water to a second compartment, which contained only clean, clear water.

Often fine marble curbs decorated the cisterns. Since marble was more durable than the other available rock, the ropes used for drawing buckets of water would not score the marble so deeply. In many houses it was possible to draw water from the cistern, even from the upper stories, because the floors had openings directly over the cistern.

Water drained from church roofs, and water gathered in large, enclosed, water proof collecting basins supplied the public cisterns. Two large cisterns with walled collecting basins are easily accessible in the upper town; another is in the lower town. Rainwater drained from the roofs of the churches of Panagia Chrysaphitissa and Christos Elkomenos supplied cisterns below the squares of each of these churches.

Drainage arrangements in the town were much less systematic than the provisions for the water supply. The drains of most of the houses emptied directly into the streets. In the south wall there were openings through which the drain water from the streets could flow into the sea. Today one can still see these drains, for example, along the passage of the Stellakis house. Only those houses that stood directly on the southern wall had a central open sewer in the basement which emptied through the wall directly into the sea. From the outside these drains were not visible.

Nowadays a water line from Yephira, built in 1963, supplies water for the residents of Monemvasia. The sewage is disposed of in cesspools.
Corbels. Those parts of buildings that jut out over the streets were built on corbels, which stand out from the surface of the wall, and serve as supports. They had the same function as the consoles of Turkish construction; that is, they made it possible for the upper stories to have a larger area than the ground floor. Corbeling allowed the upper floors to regain the space lost to the streets on the ground level. The shortage of wood around Monemvasia forced the Turks to use stone corbels instead of wooden consoles. Depending upon their use, whether they supported oriels, projecting chimneys, or galleries, the corbels might be rectangular or semicircular. The faces of the base stones were often elaborately carved, almost like wood carving. This suggests that the necessity of building with stone brought about a change in Turkish techniques of construction. Almost all of the corbels were made of porus.

The chimneys of Monemvasia evidence various stylistic influences, and date from the Turkish, the Venetian, and the Greek period of construction. All of the older ones were built on the outside of the houses, frequently supported by corbeling. An example of the old style Venetian chimney stands today on a restored house located south of the apse of the church of Christos Elkomenos (see plate 14). It is a remarkably tall stack that appears semicircular on the outside of the house, but its shaft is fully rounded above the roof. A chimney pot larger than the shaft itself sits atop the structure, supported by corbels, and decorated with moldings at the top and bottom. The chimney pot has a diameter of about one meter, and a height of about the same size.

The newer chimneys have less elaborate chimney pots. Some of them consist of blocks of porus laid with interstices, and capped with a stone slab, sometimes decorated with a pyramid atop the slab. Other chimneys only have roof tiles cemented together to form a peak. Recently, chimney pots made of fired clay fashioned after the old models have come into use.

The oriels that stick out over the streets usually served either as cupboards or as niches to sit in. Sometimes they were intended only to create a prominent place inside the houses.

It was typical for houses with large ground plans to have verandas in front of the house (see plate 27), they stood on round stone arches and usually faced the sea. Sometimes the verandas were themselves spanned by arches, thus creating galleries where one could sit out of doors, in the shade, and watch the activities in the town. Probably those verandas without covering arches were designed like pergolas, making a striking contrast of stone and plants.

Addresses in the modern sense did not exist earlier, for there were neither street numbers nor street names. Identification of the houses was thus possible only through the pargetings: pictoral representations in bas relief, sometimes with letters or numbers. All of the old pargetings of Monemvasia have disappeared. But on some restored buildings there are castings or replicas of original pargetings showing eagles, lions, and other animals. The marble lion on St. Mark above the entrance of the episcopal residence at the square of Christos Elkomenos is not such a pargeting, but rather the former symbol of Venetian sovereignty in Monemvasia.

The most interesting details of the house are the Renaissance decorations of the windows and doors. The doors showing Venetian influences have frames with fluted pilasters; both doors and windows were decorated with stone moldings. The cusped arches of doors and windows look almost Turkish to the western eye. In fact, however, this form came from the Venetians, and is an example of the so called Italian Flamboyant style, found particularly on niches and fire places (see plate 24, before the reconstruction).

Map of Monemvasia, designed by Vasieur for Grimani, 1701