Talk:Mantineia

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Mantineia treats the country round Tripoli in Arcadia, the province of Mantineia of the 19th-century sources, as a cannabis growing area: the hashish crop from the 1870s to the 1920 ban, its trade and taxation, and the cultivation police have found there since. The ancient city of Mantineia, the modern municipal unit of that name, Arcadia as an administrative unit and the town of Tripoli are separate subjects.

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Discussion

Why Mantineia is a growing area

• Gkotsinas (2020, pp. 365–366) calls the province (eparchia) of Mantineia in Arcadia the stronghold of hashish growing in Greece. Citing the agricultural census of 1911, he gives it more than 90 per cent of Greek production that year and puts the area under the crop there at 7,400 stremmata in 1887 and 16,500 in 1911.
• The report of the mayor of Orchomenus (1887), as Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou (1975, pp. 313–314) quote it, has growing spread to Orchomenus "ten years ago" from "the surrounding boroughs of Mantinea". The report's own title, in their bibliography, places Orchomenus "in Mantinea".
• in.gr (19 October 2024) reports a plantation of 1,253 plants on 35 stremmata in Tripoli municipality.

Growing status

• The status is Active: the 2024 report describes cannabis grown in Tripoli municipality, inside the area. A police find and the destruction of the plants do not mean growing has ended.
• On the historical sources alone the status would be No longer grown. Gkotsinas (2020) writes that the ban of 1920 dealt hashish "the final blow" as a crop (abstract, p. 364), that the area under it had fallen to about 3,000 stremmata by 1919 (p. 373), and that the growers turned to other crops or moved to neighbouring countries (p. 374). Because the status is Active, the infobox gives no years grown.
• The 2024 report says nothing about the plants' origin. The article does not connect them with the crop of 1870–1920.

Dating the prohibition

• Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou (1975, p. 314) date to 27 March 1890 a circular of the Department of the Interior prohibiting the import, growing and use of hashish, "in force until 1920". Bouquet (1951) dates the prohibition of growing to 1920. Gkotsinas (2020) describes the crop as legal and taxed from 1906 (Law 3123/1906) and banned by Law 2107/1920 (pp. 366, 373). The article gives the circular with its attribution and the 1920 ban in wiki voice, since two independent sources agree on it.

Extent and border

• The map border is approximate. It is Tripoli municipality as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 2174029, fetched 19 October 2026), about 1,479 km²; the infobox area is rounded from it. Tripoli, ancient Mantineia, Levidi and Orchomenos all lie inside it; Megalopoli and Argos lie outside.
• No source read maps the 19th-century province of Mantineia. Gkotsinas (2020, p. 370) also mentions telegrams of 1906 from "the provinces of Mantineia and Tripoli". The municipality is used because it covers Tripoli, round which the hashish "factories" stood, and the places the 1887 report names.
• The point in the infobox is near the centre of the border, not a field.
• Spelling: Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou write Mantinea; the article uses Mantineia, the transliteration of Μαντινεία used for the modern municipal unit.

Sources

• Gkotsinas (2020). Read in full in the PDF of the conference proceedings (Kavala, 2020; ISBN 978-960-99637-1-8), pp. 363–376. Page numbers are the printed ones. The English title is the author's own, from his abstract (p. 364). The 150 hashish "factories" round Tripoli come from a British memorandum he cites ("Memorandum of Mr. Harvey on the Hashish Industry in Greece", Greek Foreign Ministry archive, 1905–1906).
• Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou (1975). Read in full in Cannabis and Culture, pp. 303–326. The 1887 report (Ελληνική Γεωργία, March 1887, pp. 110–114) is quoted from this chapter and was not read in the original.
• Bouquet (1951). Read in full in the UNODC web edition of the Bulletin on Narcotics, which has no page breaks. He names Greece only at country scale.
• in.gr (2024). Read in Greek; the English title is a translation. The report gives no village.
• The Real Seed Company, Arcadian. A seller's listing, attributed in the article and used for the seed line only, not for the history of the crop.

Sources not used

• Greek newspaper histories of the crop (Efimerida ton Syntakton, 3 June 2017 and 6 June 2021) and a 2016 blog transcription of I. Th. Bakopoulos's 1914 report on hashish growing in Mantineia were read for leads only. Their figures (the 1911 area by prefecture, export quantities, output in Arcadia) are not used.
• Papadopoulos (1959), quoted by Stefanis, Ballas and Madianou (p. 314), estimates about 26,000 acres under hashish in Greece before 1915. The figure is for the whole country and second-hand, and is not used.
• G. I. Spéis, Όταν το χασίς ήταν νόμιμο (Athens, 2018), cited by Gkotsinas, has not been read.
• A 2024 report of 115 plants in Gortynia municipality concerns a place outside the area.