Kalavryta is built near the ancient city of
Cynaetha. During the late
Middle Ages, the town was the centre of the
Barony of Kalavryta within the
Frankish Principality of Achaea, until it was reconquered by the
Byzantines in the 1270s. After that it remained under Byzantine control until the fall of the
Despotate of the Morea to the
Ottoman Turks in 1460. With the exception of a
30-year interlude of Venetian control, the town remained under Turkish rule until the outbreak of the
Greek War of Independence in 1821, in whose early stages Kalavryta figures prominently: it was here that on 21 March 1821 the flag of the revolt was raised at the monastery of Agia Lavra by bishop
Germanos III of Old Patras. At the end of 1943, near Kalavryta, 81 German soldiers, led by Hauptmann Johannes Schober, were captured by Greek partisans. Four Germans were killed on the spot. Three were taken to hospital at Kalavryta but were later shot by the furious partisans. The rest were initially treated as prisoners of war until most were shot dead and some plunged over the cliff near Mazi from the force of the shots. Two German prisoners survived the execution and raised the alarm on the following day 8 December 1943. On 13 December 1943, in retribution for the killing of the captured German soldiers, German troops perpetrated the
Kalavryta massacre: they ordered all male residents of Kalavryta aged 14 years or older to gather in a field just outside the village. Some 1,300 women and children were locked in a school which was then set on fire while the men were looking on from a hill outside the village. Then 696 boys and men were machine-gunned; only 13 survived. After that, they burnt down the town before they left and the next day they burnt down the
monastery of
Agia Lavra, the birthplace of the
Greek War of Independence. In total, 752 civilians were killed during "Operation Kalavryta", a deliberate strategy by the Nazis in order to break the resistance by targeting civilians. After the war, the federal government of Germany offered gestures of atonement in the form of free school books for the high school, scholarships for orphans of the massacre and the building of a retirement home. However, German commanders, including Major Ebersberger who carried out the destruction of Kalavryta and Hauptmann Dohnert who led the firing party, were never brought to justice for their crimes. The Kalavryta region also became the site of fighting during the
Greek Civil War. On 11 April 1948, Kalavryta
was seized by the
Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) after the former overpowered the town's garrison. DSE released 17 leftists held in the local gendarmerie building, while also emptying the national guard and
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration warehouses; taking 400 million
drachmas and large quantities of food and military equipment in the process. ==Historical population==