Tower Tha

The Tower Tha stands as a scant remnant of Rhodes’ late-medieval Hospitaller period, a rectangular residential tower raised in 1477, according to Stephen C. Spiteri, and possibly doubling as a watchtower in times of danger. It sits beside the Ágios Geórgios Monastery, two kilometres north-northeast of Lachanía, on the old road to Jennádi, though earlier travellers mislocated it: Albert Berg in 1862 placed it on a sea-commanding hill, while Giuseppe Gerola, writing in 1914, tied it to the church of Agía Iríni. Peter Lock finally set the record straight in 2006. The structure once measured 13 by 8 metres, with two storeys and ground-floor walls about 1.5 metres thick, its lower half carved into a talus and separated from the upper masonry by a cordon. Today only scattered stones and fragments of filling masonry survive, with any possible enceinte lost beneath collapsed rubble and vegetation. The exact history of its construction and use remains unknown.