Messolonghi – Aitoliko
Greece's largest lagoon system and the delta the Acheloos built — fish traps, stilt huts and salt pans, a dead layer of hydrogen sulphide under Aitoliko, and the town where Byron died and the Exodus began.
The Εθνικό Πάρκο Λιμνοθαλασσών Μεσολογγίου–Αιτωλικού was declared by joint ministerial decision 22306, gazetted on 31 May 2006, under a name that reads as an inventory: the Messolonghi–Aitoliko lagoons, the lower courses and mouths of the Acheloos and Evinos rivers, and the Echinades islands. That comes to 616,000 stremmata — 616 square kilometres — partitioned into 3,060 stremmata of absolute protection, 356,769 of nature protection, 247,408 of peripheral area and 8,808 of peripheral zone. The 150 square kilometres usually quoted for Messolonghi is the water surface of the lagoons, not the park, which runs from islands in the Ionian east to Varasova, a 917-metre limestone wall rising straight off the Gulf of Patras. The Acheloos built the whole of it: Herodotus wrote that the river had already turned half the Echinades into mainland. The silting has since stopped, and the dams upstream — Kremasta from 1965, then Kastraki and Stratos — hold the sediment back for good.
The main lagoon is nowhere more than five or six metres deep and over most of its area far less, a few tens of centimetres along the shore, which is why it has been farmed rather than merely fished. The ivaria — the word descends from Latin vivarium by way of Italian — are enclosures whose fences work with the fish's own movements, letting mullet, sea bass, sea bream and eel in and closing the way back to the sea. The fishermen's huts that go with them, the pelades, stand on piles over open water along the approach to Tourlida, reached by a causeway of about five kilometres, so that you cross with lagoon on both sides and no land in sight. Mullet roe from these waters, salted and dried whole, is avgotaracho Messolongiou, one of the few fishery products in Europe carrying a protected designation of origin. The saltworks still run on pans at the lagoon's western end.
Aitoliko, ten kilometres up the lagoon, is a town of under five thousand built on an islet and joined to each shore by a stone bridge. Its own basin is the anomaly in a shallow system — fourteen square kilometres and around thirty metres deep, permanently stratified, its deep water anoxic and charged with hydrogen sulphide. It kills things when it rises: mass fish deaths have recurred here, and the usual explanation is poor renewal of the deep water compounded by nutrients washing off the land. The birds are largely indifferent. More than 250 species have been recorded across the lagoon complex, and the Dalmatian pelican divides its western Greek population between here and the Amvrakikos Gulf up the coast.
Byron reached Messolonghi on 5 January 1824, spent three months paying out of his own pocket to hold a fractious garrison together, and died here on 19 April aged thirty-six, of a fever his doctors bled him for. Reşid Mehmed Pasha invested the town on 15 April 1825; Ibrahim's Egyptians joined the siege in January 1826 and took the lagoon islets that March — Vasiladi on the ninth — closing the last supply route in. On the night of 10 April 1826 the Exodus was attempted: of roughly 9,000 people inside, 7,000 were strong enough to try the breakout, and about a thousand reached safety. The rest were killed at the gates or hunted down in the plain beyond. Delacroix had Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi finished and on show in Paris within months, and the town has carried the title Hiera Polis, Sacred City, ever since. The Garden of Heroes was laid out over the tumulus of the unnamed dead, and the Exodus has been marked with a procession every Palm Sunday since.
What's worth knowing before you go
Messolonghi town is the base, about 240 kilometres from Athens: the A8 to Rio, the Rio–Antirrio bridge, then the Ionia Odos north to Exit 4, under three hours if the tolls don't trouble you. KTEL buses run from Athens and from Agrinio, but take a car — the ends of the park, the Echinades, the Evinos mouth, Aitoliko and the Kleisova lagoon, are an hour from one another and the interesting things are all at the edges. Aktion is the nearest airport of any size, up the coast past the Amvrakikos. Come between October and March for the birds, and accept that the lagoon tracks turn to grease after rain. High summer is the wrong season on every count: the shallows warm through and smell accordingly, the air over them does not move, and the mosquitoes are not a rumour.
Buy the avgotaracho whole rather than sliced. The roe is salted, sun-dried and then sealed in a coat of melted beeswax, and that coat is what keeps it — a cut piece has had the seal broken for you and begins going the day it leaves the shop. Shave it thin and eat it cold; heat wastes it.