Stand at the edge of Metamorfosi today and look southeast: roughly 1,300 meters out, a wetland basin called the Vothana draws ornithologists and botanists who come to catalog its unusual birds and flora. It sits in the same geologic depression that the earthquake of AD 375 carved into the landscape. That seismic event did not merely rearrange terrain — it erased cities. Asopos and Epidavros Limira, two prosperous towns on the eastern Laconian coast, were destroyed. From the wreckage and the displaced population, a new fortified settlement rose on a sea-girt rock: Monemvasia, which would become one of the great Byzantine strongholds of the Mediterranean.

The village that grew near the sinkhole occupied the foot of Mount Koulochera, at the outer edge of the Parnon range, at 120 meters elevation. Beneath it, something remarkable: a cave called Trypa tou Voria — the Hole of the North — so vast that the village sits atop a section of it. Italian speleologists from the group SPARVIERE discovered it in the late 1990s, their headlamps catching stalagmites and stalactites in chambers the villagers above had never seen.

The land around Metamorfosi has been inhabited since the Bronze Age. Pre-Hellenic Leleges settled here first; around 3000 BC Achaeans arrived; around 1100 BC the Dorians came, beginning what the history books call the Spartan Years. When Rome absorbed Greece in 146 BC, eighteen Laconian cities — Gythio and Asopos among them — formed the Union of the Free Laconians, angling for imperial favor.

Crusaders arrived around 1204. Frankish rule followed from 1210 to 1259, when Byzantine forces reestablished control. In the 1260s, the Bishop of Mystra settled roughly ten thousand Albanians across the region; some chose the valley near the sinkhole, working the land as shepherds. Then came the Ottomans in 1460, and they stayed for the better part of four centuries — with one Venetian interruption, 1684 to 1715, that briefly flipped the flag without much changing daily life.

By the eve of the 1821 revolution, Katavothra held fifteen Turkish families and thirty-six Greek ones. The Turks held the most fertile ground. On March 22, 1821, the Turkish families fled to the fortress at Monemvasia, anticipating what was coming. A week later, on March 29, Greeks — including men from Katavothra — helped seize that castle. Ibrahim Pasha's army burned through in 1825, leveling villages across Laconia. The settlement rebuilt. It always did.

The oldest structure in the village is a small Byzantine church dedicated to Saint Georgios, tucked into the cemetery. Its builders worked with marble and repurposed Roman columns — columns that had likely stood in one of the towns the earthquake destroyed. Under Ottoman rule, the church reportedly served as a krifo scholio, a secret school where Greek children learned their language and letters in defiance of occupation. The practice was illegal. The risk was real. The church's thick stone walls and cemetery setting made it discreet.

West of the village, the Tsakonas stream runs through a quiet canyon. To the south, at a spot called Pigadia — the Wells — restored traditional watermills stand along the water's edge, their millstones worn smooth by centuries of grain. These are not museum pieces so much as evidence: of how long people have been working this valley, channeling its water, grinding its harvest.

When Ioannis Kapodistrias organized the new Greek state in 1828, Katavothra began reassembling itself. Families returned from the diaspora — the Roumanis from Spetses, the Laggis from Crete, the Batsakis from Zaraka. By 1928, the village held 761 inhabitants. A primary school opened in 1927. The community was building forward.

Giorgos Lafkas was born here in 1919. He grew up to become a singer and songwriter, his name known beyond the village's 120 meters of altitude and its population of a few hundred. He died in 1972. His music outlasted him, as music tends to do.

The rename came in 1961 with the completion of the church of the Metamorphosis of Christ — and with it, the village shed its ancient identity as a sinkhole and became, officially, a transformation. The 2021 census counted 504 residents. The strong northerly winds that define the local climate still blow through in summer. The wetland still draws its birds. The cave beneath the streets still holds its formations in darkness, patient and unchanged.