The monumental palace complex of Iklaina, majestic in its well-ordered simplicity, comes as something of a surprise in the hills northeast of the seaside town of Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese. Gazing over the bay where the Greeks and their allies won a decisive naval victory for the country’s independence in the Battle of Navarino in 1827, this spacious, organized town, complete with palace, administrative buildings, streets and public squares, is almost the last thing you expect to see among the olive trees. Outside its imposing gates, we see modest homes and workshops that served the town, which was surrounded by cyclopean walls, protecting its luxurious palace and advanced infrastructure.
Alas, these are but reconstructed scenes of ancient Iklaina, which, however, would not have been possible to envisage without the valuable work done at the site by Michael Cosmopoulos, a Greek professor of archaeology at the University of Missouri-St Louis (UMSL) in the United States, who spearheaded the excavations here. The first phase of the dig – which brought up a piece of a stone tablet inscribed in Linear B (the earliest known form of Greek writing) shedding light on how what was possibly the first federal state in the Western world was run – has now been completed.