Why the Mani is covered in tower houses, and why they are younger than you think

There are two stories about the Mani's towers. The popular one is wrong, and the published one is more interesting.

The popular story

Greece spent four centuries under Ottoman rule. The Mani is covered in fortified stone houses. Therefore the towers were built against the Turks.

What the record says

The Ottomans hardly came. Across the whole Ottoman period, occupation on the ground "seems to have been restricted to the fortresses of Passava". There is a single recorded Ottoman village in the entire southern study region: Tourkovrisi, established near the rebuilt Passava fortress after the 1715 reconquest.

The strongest evidence is an absence. The Ottoman administration compiled a tax register for the whole Peloponnese in 1460 to 1463, immediately after the conquest. The Mani is not in it. The likely explanation, in the archaeologist's own words, is that it "had not been fully conquered by 1463".

A tax register is how a state turns territory into revenue. A province missing from one is a province the state cannot count.

So who were they for

Each other. And the engine underneath is the ground: limestone with shallow soils that will not hold water, so the small amount of land worth farming was the only asset there was.

The vertical arms race follows from geometry. If your neighbour can drop a stone on your roof and you cannot reach his, you lose. So you build higher, and so does he, and stopping first is losing.

The state that finally pulled them down was Greek. In 1833, the Bavarian regency governing the new kingdom acted to dismantle them. A Maniot vendetta was still being recorded in 1870.

The correction that reorganises what you see

The stone architecture divides into two things visitors routinely merge.

The old layer is the palaiomaniatika, the old Maniot settlements. Over 170 of them survive with premodern stone architecture, at 10 to 50 houses each, and about half are now abandoned. They are dry-stone, built of quarried local limestone, and occupied from as early as the 8th century.

Across a survey of all standing architecture in the southern half of the peninsula, an area of about 350 square kilometres, watch huts and towers together came to 16 in total.

The tall towers you photograph are not that layer. The substantial change in settlement architecture "is believed to have occurred only after the late seventeenth century".

So the tower era is late and short, and it is bracketed with unusual precision. The 730 people who sailed from Oitylo left in 1675. The demolition programme came in 1833. The towers went up between the people who gave up and the state that arrived.

How to read one

Do not look at the tower. Look for the compound around it: the wall, the family's other houses, its own small church and its own graves. The scholarship calls that a xemoni. Find those four things together and you are standing in one clan's entire world.

One counterintuitive detail worth carrying. Measured wall thicknesses average about 113cm in plains settlements and about 87cm on hillsides and hilltops, a statistically significant difference. The thickest walls are down on the flat, because up on a ridge the hill is already doing the defending. People built exactly as much defence as the ground failed to give them.

More on the region in where the Peloponnese pages start, and there is a place to stay near Kardamyli if you want to see this properly.

Sources: R. M. Seifried, "The Stone-Built Palaiomaniatika of the Mani Peninsula, Greece", in Deserted Villages, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2021, doi:10.7275/pt2g-nw28; Oikonomopoulou et al., Land 12(8):1579, 2023, doi:10.3390/land12081579. Checked 24 August 2026.