Arta Castle

The clock tower of Arta stands beside the castle’s northwestern side, though it is a separate structure and merits its own attention. Rising 21 metres, it was raised sometime between 1630 and 1650, making it the oldest clock in Epirus and among the earliest in Greece. The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi first mentioned it, claiming its bell could be heard an hour’s journey away and that its mechanism surpassed any other city clock in the empire. Originally it kept time by the Muslim system, tied to the daily prayer intervals, and bore Arabic inscriptions. In 1908 a western-style pendulum mechanism replaced the original, and in 1994 that too gave way to an electronic system. The tower itself remains in very good condition, a quiet monument to shifting methods of measuring the hours.

Heritage data from Wikidata, compiled and verified in the Atika atlas.