Sidirounda

In the middle of Sidirounda, a hilltop village on Chios, stands a medieval tower opposite the church of Agios Georgios. Local tradition remembers it as a three-storey structure with two entrances, part of a defensive arrangement that protected the settlement. Only the ground floor survives today, renovated to house the village's folklore museum. The tower's design matches those found in other Chian villages, and the old stone houses clustered around it, their walls forming a continuous fortification, echo the castle-villages of the island's south. Such towers on Chios are usually Genoese work from the late fourteenth or fifteenth century. Yet this one is better classed as Late Byzantine, because the village was a dependency of the great monastery of Nea Moni, as confirmed by a bull of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (reigned 1391-1425). A Genoese tower on monastic property seems unlikely. From its height, Sidirounda keeps visual contact with the network of vigles, or watchtowers, across western Chios, notably those at Pahis and Prastia.