---

Modern Description: After Kaméni Langáda (2.5km), the road west of Chora rises sharply to a curve where it levels out with wide views: due south, above the coast, is visible a long, low katoikía, about twenty five minutes by foot from the road. This is Pyrgí, where the main body of the building complex is formed by the massive base of a Hellenistic farmstead measuring about nine and a half metres square, built up in courses of irregular rectangular blocks of the native stone. Although the position is panoramic, with Mount Prophitis Elias on Santorini clearly visible in front, the lack of fallen masonry would suggest that this was never a higher structure or watchtower, but a principally agricultural building protecting and surveying the cultivated uplands of the west of the island. This area may have been much more fertile in antiquity. Today the only outbreak of fertility is at Vághia (3.5km), where a spring has unexpectedly fostered stands of reeds and a small, vivid band of cultivation.

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

---