Tower of the Winds

Listen for a moment. Behind you, the cafés of Plaka clink with cups and cutlery. In front of you, there is pale marble, warm under the Athenian sun, rising in eight clean faces. The ground here sits lower than the modern street, so you look slightly down into the old Roman marketplace. Then your eye travels up, past the columns and the scattered stones, to a small octagonal tower that has stood on this spot for more than two thousand years.

This is the Tower of the Winds. In ancient sources it is linked to a man named Andronikos of Kyrrhos, an astronomer. Scholars still debate exactly when he built it. Most place it somewhere in the second or first century before Christ. What nobody debates is its purpose. This was not a temple and it was not a tomb. It was a public timepiece, a weather station, and a calendar. In short, it was a machine for telling Athenians what the sky was doing.

Start with the shape. Eight sides, and each side faces one of the eight points of the compass. North, northeast, east, and so on around the circle. That is not decoration. The whole building is oriented like a compass rose set in stone. If you know which way north lies, the tower tells you all the other directions at a glance. Ancient sailors and merchants in this market would have understood that immediately.

Now lift your eyes to the top band of each face. There you will see a carved figure, floating sideways, robes blowing. These are the eight winds, imagined by the Greeks as winged gods. Each one carries a clue about the weather he brings. The cold north wind, Boreas, is a bearded old man, wrapped up warmly and blowing into a conch shell. He looks as if he has just walked in from a winter storm.

Walk slowly around the tower and meet the others. On the southern side, Notos, the wet south wind, tips an urn so that water pours out. That is rain, coming up from the sea. Zephyros, the gentle west wind, is young and lightly dressed, with flowers gathered in his cloak. He is the breeze of spring. The northeast wind, Kaikias, carries a shield heaped with hailstones. The carvers were telling you, in pictures, what each wind would do to your day.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Look just below the wind gods, on the flat marble faces. You may be able to pick out faint straight lines cut into the stone, fanning out like spokes. These are the remains of sundials. When the sun was shining, a metal pointer cast a shadow across these lines, and anyone in the market could read the hour. One building, eight sundials. Whichever side you stood on, at least one of them was catching the light.

But what happened on a cloudy day, or at night? This is the second surprise. Inside the tower there was a water clock. Water flowed in at a steady rate, and its rising level marked the passing hours. The small round structure attached to the south side is believed to have held the water tank. The supply is thought to have come from a spring on the slopes of the Acropolis, just above you. Sun outside, water inside — the tower could keep time in any weather.

And on the very top, there was once a moving part. The Roman architect Vitruvius, writing in the first century before Christ, describes a bronze figure of Triton on the roof. Triton was a sea god, half man and half fish. He held a rod and turned with the wind, so his pointer showed which wind god was blowing. The bronze is long gone. Still, picture it up there, glinting and swinging over the crowd below.

Notice the two small porches, on the northeast and northwest sides. Each is framed by slender columns. These were the entrances. Notice the roof as well. It is a low cone made of marble slabs, laid in a pattern that meets at a point in the centre. Building a stone roof like this, with no wooden beams, took real skill. It is one reason the tower has survived so well while so much around it fell.

The tower did not stop living when the ancient world ended. In the Christian centuries it is believed to have served as a church or a baptistery, a place for baptism. Later, during the Ottoman period, it became a tekke — a lodge for dervishes, members of a mystical Muslim brotherhood. Travellers in the eighteenth century wrote about seeing their ceremonies here, with music and turning prayer. So the same room that once measured time with water later filled with song and slow, circling movement.

For a long period the base of the tower lay buried under earth and later buildings, as the city level rose around it. Excavations in the nineteenth century cleared the ground and exposed the old marketplace again. That is why you stand above it now, looking down. The tower has also had careful restoration in more recent years. When the doors are open, you can sometimes step inside and look up at the underside of that stone roof.

The ruins around you belong to the Roman Agora, a marketplace built when Athens was part of the Roman world. Look for the broken columns, the paved courtyard, and the remains of a gateway on the western side. Imagine traders, shoppers, and officials moving through here. Many of them would have glanced up at the tower to check the time, the way people today check their phones.

Before you leave, choose one wind god and stand directly beneath him. Feel the air on your face right now. Is it coming from his direction? Then look up past the tower to the walls of the Acropolis, and back down to the café tables at the edge of the site. As you walk out into the lanes of Plaka, notice the breeze again. Two thousand years ago, someone here would have looked up, read the stone, and known its name.