The presence of Venice, the stance of the winged lion over the town gate, appeared in these violent instances to be a pledge of balance: Normans and Catalans may well come and pass, Turks may hurricane around the land, yet there at the fringe of the blue the towers of Venice looked as if it would stand inviolate. occasionally it used to be actually so, and in a few Venetian towns of Greece humans may possibly rarely conceive of existence with out the safety of St Mark. In others the Venetian tenure used to be short, yet so powerful that during a short while an historical comity may be altogether Venetianized, its earlier part forgotten and its destiny it seems that secured. One such position used to be Monemvasia, at the east coast of the Peloponnese. The Venetians governed it for only a century, from 1463 to 1540, and it was once a well-known position lengthy earlier than their time, however it could have been designed by means of nature for them, so ideally suited was once it to their demeanour. It used to be a steep nearly treeless rock, attached to the mainland via a causeway probably 100 yards lengthy, and it were inhabited continually. The ancients had outfitted a fort on its windswept summit. The Byzantines had outfitted a church there, naming it after Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and made it the seat of a bishopric. Corsairs of Monemvasia have been infamous during the heart a while; wine of Monemvasia used to be well-known, as malmsey, all over the place Europe. however the Venetians made it their very own, and constructed it into probably the most attention-grabbing of all their colonial stations. Monemvasia capacity ‘the purely entrance’, and also you needs to nonetheless procedure where over the causeway from the mainland. It was once seriously fortified in Venetian instances, yet this day it rarely sounds like a bridge in any respect, so slender is the channel there. there's no doubt, however, in regards to the insularity of Monemvasia. Its monstrous yet shapely rock rises from the ocean in a posture splendidly aside. In its major it bristled with armaments, from causeway to excessive summit, or even now as you go through the double gateway in its partitions, close to the water’s part, you're feeling you're passing into a few exceptionally unwelcoming, if now not really opposed encampment. The reduce city of Monemvasia, enclosed inside its personal partitions close to the ground of the rock, is predominantly Byzantine, and feels it. a bit colony of Bohemians and expatriates lives there, and there's a café, and a modest pension (defined in a single of the franker fresh guidebooks as ‘spooky’). a lot of it, although, is in ruins. Crisscross arid complicated run its alleys in the course of the wreckage, just like the runs of weasels or urban foxes, and its homes are jumbled cheek-by-jowl at the escarpment above the ocean, occasionally virtually on best of one another, in order that the lanes need to burrow and probe underneath them, the following and there starting out right into a little plaza with a church, or a overlooked esplanade alongside the sea-wall. A goat nibbles distractedly one of the toppled partitions; the voices of Stuttgart batik designers echo thickly down the alleys; from their shadowy terrace an aged French couple with their spaniel examine, glasses in hand, the passing of the centuries during this position.