Upon hearing the church bells ring, all the males from the nobility clan would rush to their marble-roofed towers. After grabbing their arms, they would dash up the stairs to reach their battle positions and fire at the enemy. From the narrow openings in their five-story stone towers they wouldn’t see the sea, or the grey rocky mountains around. The stern beauty of the surrounding wild landscape would be inaccessible to them for a while, possibly for a decade. They would only see their attackers, coming on to take their lives and tear down the roof over their head.

Killing the men and taking off the roof – these were the requirements which would make the Maniots win their wars. Settling in the Mani Peninsula on Peloponnesus after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, numerous noble clans, calling themselves Nikians, found it difficult to share its tiny, infertile land.

Their blood feuds defined the history of the area for four centuries, reducing it to endless little wars between the nobility and constant migration for the rest of the population. For the battles of the Nikians belonged only to the Nikians. The men would fight, while the women and the children, generally out of danger, would provide the food. The common peasantry was not only free to go - it was encouraged to do so.

The wars of the Maniots - lasting, bloody and numerous, left the landscape dotted with hundreds of half-destroyed towers, spreading further and further the word of the locals’ somewhat ominous character.

The fear from their ferocity grew so strong that under the Ottoman Empire two fortresses were built at the entrance of the Mani Peninsula – not to guard the Maniots, but rather to protect the Peloponnesus from them.

In the nineteenth century the modern world realised that this fortification made sense: in September of 1831, the Mavromihalis clan spectacularly murdered the first Greek Prime Minister, Kapodistrias, on the fountain steps in the then-capital of the new independent state, Nafplio.

The latest major Maniots’ battle took place quite a few years later – in 1870, when it grew so far out of control that the national army had to interfere to put it down.

Today, sitting in the friendly tavernas and terraces of Areopoli or Kitta one can hardly believe the peninsula’s history. Yet the towers, mostly halved, are here as a proof. They make the most stunning feature of the Mani, one of the wildest territories of mainland Greece. Built out of rocks cut from the mountains that dominate the peninsula, they often merge with the landscape from a distance and only their shadows or an occasional leafy background make them stand out.

Although architecturally unremarkable, the towers add something human to the moony look of the Mani. Ironically, despite their once gloomy role, the feeling they provoke is that of an enduring civilization.

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