Ierapetra-walls

The remnants of Ierapetra's Byzantine fortification are among the few traces of the city's early medieval past, and they survive only as broken sections of wall totalling roughly 150 metres around the traffic education park at the south-west edge of town, near the artificial lake known as Navmachia. These were evidently sea walls, guarding the harbour front of the settlement then called Ierapytna, a name that appears in Hierocles' Synekdimos of around 532 AD. The masonry closely resembles early Byzantine work at Nikopolis and Thessaloniki, so the walls were probably raised in the fourth or fifth century and strengthened under Justinian in the sixth, making them perhaps Crete's only true Justinianic fortification. They were likely ruined by the great earthquake of 796 or the Saracen conquest, and never repaired thereafter. The Venetians ignored them, the Ottomans built their own walls in 1647, and those were demolished in 1899. Archaeological work here took place only between 2006 and 2008.