The village sits at 750 meters on the outskirts of Mount Mainalo, 17 kilometers from Megalopoli and 11 from Stemnitsa, its nearest town of note. Stone houses cluster on terraced slopes, their walls the same grey-brown as the mountain itself. The original settlement, according to archaeological evidence, lay northeast of the current village in late antiquity, and bore the name Paroreia.

The current name, Psari, invites speculation. In Greek, psari means fish — and local tradition holds that the name came from a breeder of fish-colored horses who once lived here. A rival theory reaches further back, to Old Slavic: the word pbsarb, meaning dog-breeder, which arrived with Slavic migrations into the Peloponnese in the 7th and 8th centuries. Neither explanation can be proven, and the village seems comfortable holding both stories at once.

During the years of Ottoman occupation, the old Byzantine church of Agios Georgios — today the chapel of the village cemetery — served as a metropolitan cathedral, one of the rare places where Greek Orthodox worship continued under pressure. Kolokotronis visited it, which was precisely the problem. The monks of the Monastery of Agios Ioannis, just outside the village, informed the Ottoman authorities of his presence. He escaped at the last moment, helped by local residents.

His revenge, when he returned, was to burn the monastery. The act says something about the moral complexity of the occupation years: resistance was not uniform, and even institutions of faith could be instruments of collaboration. What is certain is that Kolokotronis remembered Psari clearly enough to name it in his memoirs, a distinction few villages of this size can claim.

When the French mission surveyed the Peloponnese in 1830, Psari had 81 inhabitants and 17 families. By the first official Greek census in 1834, recorded under the name Psaraki, the population had nearly doubled to 155 residents in 31 families — the third-largest settlement in its municipality. In 1844 the village was annexed to the Municipality of Trikolonoi, whose seat was in Stemnitsa, and Georgios "Spanomichos" Diamantopoulos was elected its first mayor with 20 votes.

The 1872 electoral rolls show 61 male voters; the oldest, Georgios Diamantopoulos of the Demos, was born in 1810. After that, the numbers began to fall. The region pioneered emigration to the United States as early as the late 1890s, and Psari followed the pattern common across mountainous Arcadia: gradual development through the early 20th century, then a long, slow hemorrhage of people toward cities and abroad.

Psari today is a quiet village of stone houses, agricultural smallholdings, and livestock. The Zoodochos Pege feast draws the community each year, and August brings cultural events to the central square. The climate is sharply mountainous — cold winters with snow, cool summers that make the terrace a relief from the plains below.

Since 2019, the renovated old schoolhouse has housed a museum dedicated to the history of education in modern Greece. Nearby, the Arkadiani multipurpose hall contains a traditional restaurant, a sweets workshop where local recipes are still made, and a small museum of village life. The Byzantine church of Agios Georgios, dated to the 13th century, stands at the cemetery's edge. The ruins of the burned monastery remain on their hill. Together, these small landmarks hold the village's layered history — conquest, resistance, betrayal, and the steady rhythm of agricultural life that has continued through all of it.