Pavlokastro

Pavlokastro is a Frankish fortification from the early 1390s, now reduced to a few stubborn fragments on a conical hill southeast of the village that shares its name, in Achaea. What survives above ground is chiefly the ruin of a trapezoid tower, plus some underground water tanks and tunnels, all of which are only visible from the summit. The name, meaning Paul's castle, almost certainly honours Paolo Foskari, the Catholic archbishop of Patras from 1375 to 1394, who also served for a time as the bailiff, or 'the Hand', of the Principality of Achaea. The dating is inferred from two documentary clues: it does not appear in the 1391 list of fiefs, yet features in the Latin archdiocese's castle list of 1408, and later appears in the catalogs of 1463, 1467 and 1471 as Paleocastro or Paolocastro. Given Foskari's death in 1394, construction most plausibly began around 1390.