Preveliana

A lonely Venetian tower-house stands in open countryside about two and a half kilometres south-east of the village of Preveliana, in the Heraklion region of Crete. Its history and owners are unknown, though it is certainly Venetian in origin, probably built in the sixteenth century, possibly earlier. Such rural towers were not true fortifications but mansions, belonging to wealthy Venetian or Greek landowners, and they combined comfort with a few defensive touches. The surviving remains are rather poor: a shell of a building, with the ruins of other structures around it, suggesting a larger complex of which the tower was the centre. A chapel of the Virgin Mary stands a hundred metres to the north-east. The Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Gerola visited in 1914 and called it an old tower, recording interior dimensions of 4.80 by 8.35 metres; his photograph shows it in much the same state as today. A similar but larger tower-house, Kavalou, lies three kilometres south, and Gerola placed both within the Venetian Castellania di Mirabello.