The quake was felt throughout the peninsula and as far away as Athens, causing panic in villages and towns in the west and the north of the Peloponnese, when it struck around 3:25 pm (1325 GMT), NET public television reported.

The National Observatory of Athens located the quake 205 kilometres (130 miles) west of the capital near the town of Andravida. Observatory research chief Gerassimos Papadopoulos said the epicentre was about 10 kilometres (six miles) underground.

A man in his sixties was killed in the village of Kato Achaia when the roof of his house collapsed, firefighters said.

And an 80-year-old woman died of a heart attack in the same village in the northwest of the Peloponnese, police said.

Thirty-seven people were injured, suffering mostly from fractures according to health service officials and rescuers.

Dozens of houses were damaged, and 50 collapsed near the epicentre.

George Stavrakakis of the Athens Observatory's Geodynamic Institute said the quake was "the biggest recorded in the region" in a long time.

"The quake was terrible. We have not had such a big one even though we're used to them," said the mayor of the town of Pyrgos, George Paraskevopoulos. "It lasted for quite a while and everybody ran from their homes."

Pyrgos' Agios Nicolaos church suffered serious damage and several buildings in the town centre showed cracks after the quake, he added.

Firefighters said old houses in Pyrgos, Amaliada, surrounding villages and in the port area of Patras were also damaged.

Rescuers managed to save a little girl in the village of Fostena after she got stuck in her home and a family of three and two other people were also rescued from their houses in the village of Bartholomiou.

Bartholomiou mayor Christos Vryonis said about 100 buildings had been damaged.

A landslide cut a road at Diakopto in the north of the peninsula and the national railway company OSE stopped all traffic on the Patras-Pyrgos line for checks.

Electricity was cut in several villages after the quake felled pylons.

Papadopoulos expected Sunday's quake to be followed by a series of strong aftershocks in the next couple of days.

Some had already been registered Sunday afternoon, with the biggest reaching 4.7 on the Richter scale, he said. He called on people in the region to keep calm and urged authorities to quickly check the state of buildings.

Engineers were to inspect possible damage in schools, the education ministry said.

The quake was also felt in southern Italy, across the Ionian sea from Greece, Italian officials said but no one was hurt and no damage was reported.

Greece experiences more seismic activity than any other country in Europe, accounting for half of the continent's recorded quakes.

And the Peloponnese has often been at the centre of seismic activity, with a 6.5 quake registered in February off its coast, just over a month after similar tremors which did not cause any damage or injuries.

A 6.2 quake in 1986 killed 20 people in the port of Kalamata in the southern Peloponnese.

The US Geological Survey measured Sunday's earthquake at magnitude 6.1, placing its epicentre 33 kilometres southwest of Patras.

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