Palaiokastro of Vitala

On a hill called Panagitsa, four kilometres west of Vitala near Kymi, stands the Palaiokastro, a Frankish tower of probable fourteenth-century Venetian origin. Its condition is rather poor, yet the structure remains identifiable as a defensive tower rather than a residence. Before the Ottoman conquest, the village itself sat closer to this lookout, likely on the site now known as the small settlement of Kampos. The tower’s placement suggests it guarded the approaches to the interior, a lonely sentinel above the surrounding countryside. Today it survives as a weathered ruin, its masonry exposed and its original height reduced, but it still marks the medieval landscape in a way that rewards the curious traveller. The climb to Panagitsa offers a sense of that older arrangement, where settlement and fortification were intimately linked, before the village shifted to its present location and the tower was left to the hill and the years.