---

Modern Description: Returning to the main road once again, and continuing east towards Chora, a landscape of frightening austerity unfolds. At the summit, after 7.1 km, a rough track leads back (1.5 km) to the north across the rock plateau to Rimókastro. On a shallow rise, with commanding views across to Oinoussai, are the camouflaged remains of collapsed stone walls covering a large area; in the midst of this desolate scene is an outbreak of clearly cut and finished, rectangular blocks, belonging to an ancient, late-Classical or Hellenistic building, originally constructed in isodomic masonry, and apparently divided into three rooms. The threshold of the east door is carefully cut with escape channels for rainwater at the ends of the sill. The bleak and waterless rock around invites speculation as to the purpose of such a building. An absence of votive objects and a mass of potsherds of domestic items, suggests that this was a large farmstead (perhaps for the raising of a particularly tough and tenacious breed of livestock?) which may well have doubled up, as so often in the Hellenistic world, as a fortified look-out post.
DARE: 34333

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

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

---