Poros Clock Tower

Climb the stepped lanes above Poros town and you end up at Kasteli, the highest point of the little peninsula the town is built on, where a stone clock tower has kept time since 1927. It is the first thing you pick out from the deck of an arriving ferry and the last thing you lose sight of on the way out, and it has long since become the island's shorthand image.

Where the tower stands

Poros lies in the southern Saronic Gulf, roughly 31 nautical miles (58 km) south of Piraeus, separated from the Peloponnese by a channel only about 200 metres wide. The island is really two joined pieces: volcanic Sphairia, which carries the town, and larger Kalaureia to the north. The clock tower crowns the Sphairia hill, directly above the amphitheatre of white houses, which is why it works as a marker for the whole harbour rather than as one building among many.

• Getting up to it: on foot, through the stepped alleys of the old town. There is no road to the top and the climb is short but steep.
• The view: the harbour channel below, the Peloponnesian shore at Galatas opposite, and the lemon groves behind it.
• Best light: late afternoon and sunset, when the sun comes across the channel and hits the stone from the west.

How it came to be built

The tower dates from 1927. Its construction was overseen and financed by Ioannis Ch. Papadopoulos, at the time the member of parliament for Troizinia, who also arranged the purchase of the clock movement itself, an American-made mechanism dating from 1915. The structure is local stone: a square base carried on four corner supports, with a dome at the top. Its lines belong to the neoclassical taste of interwar Greece, not to any earlier period.

The clock has four faces, lit after dark, which is what keeps the tower legible from the water at night as well as by day.

Restoration, and where the old mechanism is now

By the end of the twentieth century the building had taken enough weather damage to need serious intervention, and it was restored in 2000. The historic movement was later repaired and modified in 2015. It is no longer up in the tower: it sits at ground level inside a glass case, so you can look at the gearing directly instead of imagining it above your head.

The town under the tower

The clock is young by Greek standards, but the harbour it overlooks is not. Poros took an active part in the 1821 revolution, and from 1828 to 1878 it held the first naval base of the modern Greek state, on the Kalaureia side of the channel. That is the reason the waterfront is grander than a town of some 3,300 residents would otherwise justify: the neoclassical facades along the quay, the depth of the anchorage and the width of the main street all date from the decades when the navy was here. Read in that order, the tower is the last flourish of a prosperous period rather than the start of one.

What else is worth the walk

The Archaeological Museum of Poros stands on Korizis Square, down in the town. Most of its collection comes from the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia, on the northern half of the island, and from ancient Troizen on the mainland opposite. Seeing the finds first gives the climb some context: the same hill has been watching the same stretch of water for a very long time, and the clock is only the most recent thing put on top of it.

The tower reads two ways, and it is worth catching both. From underneath, in the lanes, it is a piece of small-town civic architecture. From the water it is a navigation mark. Because Poros sits on a well-travelled route between Piraeus and the Argolic coast, many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Greece coast, and it is usually the clock face on the hill that tells them the town is coming up.