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KALAMATA is by far the largest city of the southern Peloponnese, spreading for some four kilometres back from the sea, and into the hills. It's quite a metropolitan shock after the small-town life of the rest of the region. The city has a long-established export trade in olives and figs from the Messinian plain, flourishing as a commercial centre during the Turkish period and as one of the first independent Greek towns in 1821, with the first newspaper to be printed on Greek soil five months later. In 1986 however, Kalamata was near the epicentre of a severe earthquake that killed twenty people and left 12,000 families homeless. But for the fact that the quake struck in the early evening, when many people were outside, the death toll would have been much higher. As it was, large numbers of buildings were levelled throughout the town. The intensity of the damage was in part due to the city's position over several subterranean streams, but mostly, it seems, the legacy of poor 1960s construction. The result was an economic depression across the whole area, from which the town is only now recovering properly.
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