Paleochora

Paleochora, a Byzantine castle-city some thirty kilometres south of Tripoli, stands in ruins on a mountainside, a kilometre from the Monastery of Agios Nicolaos of Kaltezes. A dirt track from the monastery gives way to a rough, barely discernible mountain path before the site appears. The settlement once held around two thousand inhabitants, and traces suggest habitation stretching back to antiquity, though nothing indicates life here in the late Byzantine period or afterwards. What survives are fragments of the defensive walls and several buildings, chiefly churches, while at the summit stand a tower and a water tank. The place speaks of a substantial medieval community, now reduced to stone and silence, its precise story left to the visitor's imagination.