When, in the early 1970s, the residents of the Paos village were warned to abandon it due to an unpredictable landslide, this was the final blow to the rapid transformation of their lives they experienced during the three previous decades. For a once prosperous settlement of more than 100 families, this was the end of the line.
From the 1940s until the late 1960s, the fate of Paos wasn’t different to the fate of hundreds of other villages in the Greek countryside: World War II and the four years of German Occupation, the Civil War that followed, and finally the extreme poverty that led to the migration to America, Germany, Belgium or Australia, slowly but steadily striped the village of its people - especially the youngest and the most active of them. And then came the landslide.
Since the 18th century, the inhabitants of Paos had managed to organize their lives around their new stone-built settlement, where the slate slabs of the roofs and the cobbled alleys gradually climb the slopes of Mount Erymanthos on the sunny side of a deep gorge above Seiraikos river. Although the Greek Revolution intervened against the Ottoman conquerors in the 1820s, leaving more than half of the village's houses burned in 1827, its progress did not stop.
Up until the interwar period (1920-30s), wheat and corn flour, barley, lentils, beans and wine, most of them with the help of the watermill in the springs of Erymanthos, were produced in the irrigated or arid fields of the villagers down in the small plain and in their vineyards. On the slopes of the mountain, they still kept countless sheep and goats, cows, pigs and horses.
The prosperity of Paos was helped not only by the fertile land of the valley of the Seiraikos river, but also by the fact that the village was always in close proximity to the road that connected the central cities of the Peloponnese with its western ports. Thus the villagers of Paos had already developed transactional trade from the years of Turkish rule.
Based on its development, Paos inaugurated one of the first schools in Greece after the country's independence in the 1820s. In the following years, it was replaced by a one-class primary school for boys and a primary school for girls. The name of the village at that time was Skoupi, up until 1928 when it was renamed Paos, from the homonymous ancient city of the area.
When the landslide became an imminent menace, the Greek state built for the residents of the village that would soon be deserted, the settlement of Neos (new) Paos in the plain, at the bottom of the valley, right on the main ‘111’ road. But, for the villagers, the big, noisy road, the concrete houses, the square housing blocks and the wide streets had nothing to remind them of the place of their ancestors.
Visiting Paos
You can visit the abandoned village of Paos at any time. All you need to do is take a short detour from the main road ‘111’, which connects the cities of Tripoli and Patras, where the new settlement of Paos is located. From there a 3-km road leads to the old village, located at 820 meters up the mountain. Particular care is required during your visit, due to the slow but continuous collapsing of houses and other buildings.
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)