Benakis

A tower-like structure stands within the old Benakis estate, a property that Kastrologos identifies as a medieval tower heavily reworked over the centuries without losing its original core. It appears as No. 17 in the Langdon list of Attica's mortared towers. The estate itself passed from an Ottoman pasha, who sold it after 1830, to Greek landlords, then to the Benakis family in 1911, and to the Benakis museum in 1962, though the property has sat abandoned since the early 1960s. Nineteenth-century researchers described a well-preserved medieval tower in a courtyard, used for grain storage, and the evidence here fits: the dimensions, shape, sturdy build, thick walls, and old stonework all point to that same structure. Its most recent role, however, was rather humbler, serving as a pigeon house. The condition today is not good, and the other, more imposing towers on the estate are merely late nineteenth and early twentieth-century constructions, not medieval at all.