Valtetsi sat for centuries at the intersection of three narrow mountain paths, each leading toward one of the major massifs — Taygetos, Menalo, Parnon — that divide the central Peloponnese. This topography made it a natural refuge. The village became known as a stronghold of klephts, the armed brigands and mountain fighters who operated beyond Ottoman administrative reach, and the character of its people was shaped accordingly: warlike highlanders, attached to a strict communal code, resistant to outside interference.

Ordinary life was built around seasonal transhumance. Shepherds moved their flocks down to milder pastures in the Argolid each winter and back to highland grazing in Tegea and Dimitsana each September. This rhythm held for roughly four hundred years, from the Ottoman conquest through the early 1950s. It was not a comfortable life. Nearby marshes brought periodic illness, and a dengue epidemic struck the village at the beginning of the twentieth century. The families of Valtetsi were accustomed to hardship the way the mountains around them were accustomed to weather.

When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, the geography of Valtetsi made it the obvious choice for a headquarters. It lay close enough to Tripolitsa — the Ottoman administrative capital of the Morea, 12 kilometers east — to threaten it, but high and defensible enough to resist counterattack. Theodoros Kolokotronis chose it as his base of operations for the siege.

The Maniots under Kyriakoulis Mavromichalis arrived and fortified the four hilltops surrounding the village — Chomatovouni, Mylos, Katsikeika, Dovrouleika — with small stone towers and defensive batteries. At the Battle of Valtetsi, the combined Maniot and local forces defeated an Ottoman attempt to break the encirclement. The victory gave the Greek side effective control of a large portion of the Peloponnese and kept the siege of Tripolitsa viable.

Kyriakoulis Mavromichalis, brother of Petrobey Petros Mavromichalis and field commander of the Maniot forces, directed the defense from Valtetsi — the first time the Maniots had operated outside Laconia since the medieval period. The church on the central square served as the chapel where the fighters prayed before battle. Kolokotronis, in the years after liberation, never forgot the village; later he commissioned the construction of the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos here in 1837, built with marble and stone from the surrounding mountains.

The Second World War arrived in Valtetsi as economic catastrophe. The village depended on Tripoli's markets and on its sheep and goats for almost every aspect of its material life. The Nazi occupation forces confiscated the animals. Without the livestock, families could not produce milk, cheese, butter, or furs; without those goods to trade, they could not buy bread, oil, or medicine. Many of the village's roughly 1,500 people relocated to Ermioni and Troezen in the Argolid by 1944.

Those who remained faced the Greek Civil War overlaid on the occupation. Communist partisans of the EAM-ELAS movement occupied Valtetsi in May 1944 under the command of kapetan Fotis Gatsopoulos, confiscating the church and major houses. The village was regarded as a royalist stronghold, and when the partisans ordered executions, the population rose and expelled them. On June 15, 1944, ELAS forces under Aris Velouchiotis returned in strength. The villagers — shepherds and farmers, badly equipped and outnumbered — were defeated. The partisans burned half the houses and killed many of the civilians they had gathered in the churchyard. By the time Hellenic Army forces freed the village months later, Valtetsi had come close to ceasing to exist.

Today Valtetsi has approximately 300 permanent residents, and it is classified as a traditional settlement — a designation that protects its architectural character and acknowledges its historical significance. The Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos, built by Kolokotronis's order in 1837 on the site of the chapel where the revolutionaries prayed in 1821, still stands. The Folklorical and Ethnological Museum in the house of the chieftain Stavros Tzavaras displays instruments, traditional dress, and records from the village's long pastoral life, with a dedicated section on the 1821 Revolution.

Every March, when Greece marks the anniversary of the War of Independence, Valtetsi holds historical re-enactments that draw politicians and visitors from across the region. The old plane tree in the square anchors it all. The Battle of Valtetsi, the church built after liberation, the village's survival through two occupations and a civil war — these are not abstractions here. They happened on this terrain, among these hills, and the village still knows exactly which ground it stands on.