Sminos (, before 2001: Σμύνος - Smynos) is a former municipality in Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it has been part of the municipality East Mani, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 94.503 km2. Population 1,139 (2021).
Sminos (, before 2001: Σμύνος - Smynos) is a former municipality in Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it has been part of the municipality East Mani, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 94.503 km2. Population 1,139 (2021).
It is located just north of the Mani Peninsula on the eastern slopes of Mt. Taygetos, and it is named after the river Smynos, that runs through it. The region is known as Vardounia (and its villages as Vardounochoria), after the medieval Vardounia castle located in the area, now in ruins. Historically, Vardounia was a buffer zone between the Ottoman-Turkish controlled Evrotas plains and the Mani Peninsula. A contingent of Muslim Albanian settlers were relocated to the region by the Ottomans. These settlers formed a large segment of the local population until the Greek War of Independence when they fled to the Turkish stronghold at Tripoli.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).