Peloponnese Guide: Ancient Troezen 
Ancient Troezen/Trizina/Dhamala was the ancient capital of the small, fertile territory of Troezenia.
In legend it was the birthplace of Theseus; the place where Poseidon startled his son Hippolytos' horses who then dragged the latter to his death; the place where Orestes was purified after his matricide.
When the Persians occupied Athens in 480BC, the people here offered hospitality to the Athenians.
The famous stele of Themistoklis was found here, which detailed his evacuation plans. The city was captured by the Athenians in 457-446BC.
During the Peloponnesian War the Troezenians sided with Sparta. The Third Greek National Assembly was held here in 1827, at which Kapodistrias, the Corfiot foreign minister of Russia, was elected President of Greece, and the Constitution of Troezen though soon put into abeyance, was published here, this being the third constitution drawn up during the 1820s.
The remains of this city are scant, unearthed by the French School in 1890 and 11899 and re-examined by the German Institute in 1932. They included three ruined Byzantine chapels in a very fragmentary state. Among the city walls is a fine tower, with a postern and staircase, square in shape (13meters square) and 10meters high, its lower half ancient, it upper half medieval.
A path along an ancient aqueduct leads from here to the gorge of Yefiraion spanned by the single arched Devil's Bridge (Yefira tou Diavolou), a natural rock formation which spans the gorge (linking both sides) and which is shaded by plane trees -a wild place which is pleasantly cool in summer. The path continues to an ancient acropolis with a sanctuary to Pan and the fort of Dhamalet, which was the seat of a 13th century Frankish barony.
West of the tower is an edifice, 30 meters square, consisting of a colonnaded court surrounded by rooms and a hall with benches and a floor with channels, which may have been an Asklipion (therapeutic center dedicated to Asklipion, god of healing).
The nearby Bishop's Palace may have been built on the site of the Temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia (Peeping Aphrodite), quite in line with Pausanius' accounts of a temple built on the spot where Phaedra watched her adored Hippolytos doing his exercises. Phaedra being the wife of Theseus (whose birthplace was said to be here) and who fell in love with her stepson (who rejected her), upon which she denounced him to his father as her attempted seducer, upon which Theseus delivered his son to the fury of Poseidon and Phaedra took her own life. These events form the theme of tragedies by both Euripidhes and Racine. Asklipios was said to have brought Hippolytos back to life.