The description of these towers and turrets in the village of Kardamyli, which are a match for the mine’s-bigger-than-yours competition of medieval San Gimignano lords, is extraordinary. Leigh Fermor was housed and cared for in one of them, with meals and fresh laundry appearing miraculously in his high-perched room.
‘It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church.’
Source: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, introduction by Michael Gorra, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 (1958), p. 34
