Bouboulina's House

A short walk back from the harbour at Dapia stands a large house with a walled courtyard that looks much like the other shipowners’ mansions in Spetses town. It is not like the others. This was the house of Laskarina Bouboulina, and it is where she was shot dead in 1825.

It is now a small museum, opened by her descendants and still run by the family, and it is the best hour of history available on Spetses.

Who she was

Bouboulina was born in 1771 in a prison in Constantinople, where her mother was visiting her imprisoned father, a Hydriot captain. She grew up on Spetses, married a shipowner, was widowed, married a second shipowner, and was widowed again. Both deaths left her wealthy and, unusually for a woman under Ottoman rule, in control of ships and capital.

Rather than living quietly on it, she spent it on the revolution. She built and armed vessels at the Old Harbour, the largest of them the Agamemnon, joined the Greek uprising when Spetses declared for it in 1821, and took part in the naval blockade of Nafplio. She is the only woman to have been given the rank of admiral in the Russian imperial navy, granted honorifically.

She did not die in battle. She died on the steps of this house, shot during a violent family dispute over a marriage. The revolution she had funded had by then largely stripped her of her fortune.

The visit

Entry is by guided tour only, in groups, at set times through the day. You cannot wander round on your own. The guides are family members or people employed by the foundation, tours run in Greek and English and often other languages depending on staffing, and they last in the region of forty minutes.

What you see is the house as a house: the reception rooms, the wooden ceilings, the furniture, weapons, ship models, documents and personal effects, and the Florentine-influenced woodwork upstairs. The guide walks you through the family story, the ships, the revolution and the killing. It works because it is a domestic space rather than a display case, and because the person telling you the story is descended from the woman in it.

The honest part

The guided-tour format is the main constraint. You arrive, you find the next tour is in thirty-five minutes, and you wait or you come back. There is no way round it. Turn up early in your visit to the island, note the times posted at the door, and plan the rest of your day around one of them rather than hoping to walk straight in.

Opening is seasonal. The museum operates through the tourist season and closes for the winter, and the exact months and daily times move from year to year. We are not going to quote you hours that will be wrong by the time you read this. Check the current times on arrival, or ask at your accommodation on the day.

Photography inside is generally not permitted. Do not plan on it.

The house is old and it is on several levels with stairs. There is no lift and accessibility for anyone with mobility difficulties is poor.

The tour is fixed in length and content, so if you are a history enthusiast hoping to linger over a specific document, you will be moved along. Conversely, if you have restless children, forty minutes of talking in a house where nothing can be touched is a long time. Judge accordingly.

There is an admission charge, in the modest range you would expect for a small private museum. It is worth it.

Note also that there is a separate and quite different institution on the island, the Spetses museum housed in another mansion, covering archaeology and local folklore. The two are not the same place and are not on the same ticket.

Where it fits

Do this first, before you walk the town. Everything you subsequently look at on Spetses, the mansions, the mosaics with ships worked into them, the cannons on the harbour front, the boatyards at the Old Harbour, makes considerably more sense once you have spent forty minutes inside the story that produced them.