Monastery of St. Marina

The Monastery of St. Marina on Kea wraps its precinct around a striking survivor: a five-storey, square Hellenistic tower, roughly ten metres to a side and originally about twenty metres high. Built of local schist with marble frames, corners and an upper floor, it is a classic free-standing defensive tower, one of the tallest ancient structures left standing in Greece. Its first job was to guard the farmland between the old cities of Koressia and Poieessa. Around 1600 AD, when the monastery was founded, the tower was absorbed into the enclosure and given a defensive role once more. An earthquake in 1958 brought most of it down, and much of the stone was recycled into nearby buildings. Only the north face remains upright, in good order, its irregular trapezoidal masonry still clear; the rest is a collapsed heap filling the interior.