Climbing Palamidi castle's 999 steps is a unique trekking experience. Tradition has it that the steps were one thousand and the last one was thrown off the cliff by Kolokotronis' horse. The truth is that the steps are actually less and were built during Otto's reign by convicts imprisoned in Palamidi under the supervision of the Bavarian army. The castle took its name from the unjustly lost hero of the Trojan War that Homer didn't mention: Palamedes, who was the son of Nauplios, was an ingenious personality, a writer and an inventor. He participated in the Trojan War and was unjustly killed due to his rivalry with Ulysses. One of the automata of Heron of Alexandria, the mechanical play, recorded the story of Nauplios' revenge for the unfair death of his son.
The idea to build this castle belonged to Venetian captain-general Morosini and the design was executed by governor Grimani. One year after its completion (1715) it fell in the hands of the Turks and remained theirs for about a century. It has eight bastions: Aghios Andreas, Robert (to honour the French philhellene that was killed in the battle of the acropolis), Miltiades, Achilles, Epaminondas, Phocion, Themistocles and Leonidas. A small chapel inside the castle devoted to Aghios Andreas celebrates the day when the town became Greek (30/11). From up here, liberation spread out all over Nafplio when Staikos Staikopoulos with a few Greeks conquered Palamidi after a surprise attack. The fate of the beautiful castle was a strange one. In 1833, Theodoros Kolokotronis was imprisoned in the Miltiades bastion on a prefabricated accusation of high treason.
