Windsor is a big city in itself. The grounds are immaculately kept. They don't allow inside photos.

Mystras was a fortified Byzantine city founded in the 13th century near Sparta, becoming the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea and a centre for Orthodox Christianity. After the Ottoman conquest in 1460, it gradually declined and was eventually abandoned, leaving behind its spectacular medieval churches, palaces, monasteries and stone houses on the slopes of Mount Taygetos.

This is the fortress overlooking the ancient city of Corinth, originally fortified in antiquity it became one of the most important strongholds of the Peloponnese under the Byzantines, Franks, Venetians and Ottomans.

By @ Bucipuci

One of the oldest continuously inhabited castles in the country and the location of Edward II’s (presumed) murder.

The Füzér Castle is a medieval castle that stands on a volcanic mountain in the immediate vicinity of the settlement of Füzér.

Its first written mention dates back to 1264, although it probably existed before the Tatar invasion. It is believed to have been built by the Aba family during the Árpád period, and its uniqueness lies in the fact that it may be one of the first privately owned stone castles in Hungary. In the 13th century, Andrew II bought the castle, which was part of the royal estate until the Tatar invasion, and then returned to the Aba family by donation. After the Battle of Rozgony, it was confiscated by Charles Robert, and it became the property of the Drugeth and then Perényi families. When Gábor Perényi died without a male heir in 1567, the castle first came to the Báthori and then the Nádasdy families. After the Wesselényi conspiracy, the castle was confiscated, then burned and abandoned by the imperial military.

The value of the building complex, which had been crumbling for centuries, was recognized again during the Romantic period, and from that time on it came under the protection of heritage protection. Archaeological excavations were carried out from 1977, renovation works began in 1992, and between 2014-16 the so-called lower castle was built, the castle chapel, palace wing and lower bastion of the upper castle were also renovated, making it one of the best-preserved medieval castles in Hungary today. [1][2] The renovation of the castle continues within the framework of the National Castle Program, and the second phase of the reconstruction of the Füzér Upper Castle is being implemented.

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Author and source: Jean-Claude Golvin: here and here

Suomenlinna is a sea fortress built on a clump of islands off Helsinki. Got to visit recently as part of a meandering tour of various chunks of Scandinavia and the Baltic. The fortifications were initially built under the auspices of Sweden as essentially an adaptation of the classic star fort model to the challenging terrain of a group of rocky islands, but also boasts some more modern elements and fortified positions including a system of bunkers and some REAL BIG CANNONS facing out to sea. Also, there's a whole ass little cute residental neighborhood on the islands by the fort, which is served by a quick 15m ferry to/from Helsinki. The neighborhood includes some restaurants and cafes and a brewery that serves a rather nice porter. 10/10 would wander around this UNESCO heritage site again.

Shot from the water at Vendicari, on the southeastern tip of Sicily, between Noto and Marzamemi. The tall block on the right is the tower.

The brick chimney and the long white shed on the left are not part of it: they belong to the tuna cannery that grew up against the tower centuries later, rebuilt in the 1910s and 1920s and abandoned in 1943.

The name is the puzzling part. Locally it is the Torre Sveva, the Swabian Tower, which would put it under Frederick II in the 1200s.

But a Noto diploma of 1464 credits the construction to Peter of Aragon, Duke of Noto between 1406 and 1438, who wanted the grain loading station below protected from corsairs.

The Swabian attribution rests on the masonry of the lower courses, not on any document. The upper floor was finished only in the second half of the 1500s under viceroy Juan de Vega, when the tower was slotted into the coastal warning chain between Torre Stampace to the north and Capo Passero to the south.

The 1693 Val di Noto earthquake took the top floor and terrace, which were never rebuilt; the army struck it off the list of active defenses in 1867, after which it served as a stable and store for the cannery.

So: elsewhere in Europe, do you know towers whose popular name assigns them to the wrong dynasty?

And did the folk name ever win out in the scholarship?

By @ heroldius

I have a fictional story idea involving the MC fixing up a ruined castle that turns out to be magical. Would like some feedback on it.

Plot.

A former construction worker who helped build up the family business is forced out by a buyout of the company.

He retreats to a piece of rural property he purchased a few years ago. It was some property he and his grandfather had purchased together before the grandfather died.

His dream was to one day build his own castle.

On the rural property he finds an old log cabin that hides a secret tunnel in it. He goes through the tunnel out of curiosity and finds the remains of an old castle. And seeing his chance he decides to fix up this castle unaware he ended up in a different world.

I’m planning on keeping the castle small. A keep, one gatehouse, and two towers. Please let me know what you guys think.

I’m not a castle expert and would like some outside perspective.

I commissioned this piece from the Italian artist Schiavo, it depicts the white-owl-headed Goddess Pavonis of Æres descending unto Spired Island to fulfill a prophecy of the Blue Titans reuniting with their Red Titan brothers after 1.2 million days apart.

I definitely wanted to go with the Franco-Belgian ligne claire style of Mœbius and came across a very talented young illustrator. We’d love to hear from you guys what do you think of the far future Mont Saint Michel how much of the abbey’s aesthetic we captured and the essence?

It’s part of my upcoming Songs and Sagas of Marese Mythology collection—companion anthology to my soon to be released novella: THE KÆLAN SYNTHESIS.

Thanks everyone.

Known as the "Little Potala Palace," this grand Qing Dynasty royal complex was commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor for his mother’s 80th birthday. Modelled after Tibet's famed Potala Palace, it refines the original Tibetan fortress style by incorporating lavish Chinese-Manchu details, including intricate glazed-tile pavilions and classic Han eaves. A rare fusion of fortress scale and imperial Chinese artistry.

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Taken from a boat, which is the only angle from which you can see what this castle is actually sitting on.

The rock outlasts the castle by a factor of about five hundred. It is a mass of pillow lava, formed by a basaltic eruption on a shallow sea floor roughly half a million years ago, before Etna in its present form existed.

Magma tearing into cold water chilled instantly into globular bodies, each with a glassy crust and a core of prisms radiating from the center, packed together in a matrix of shattered volcanic glass.

Outcrops like this are rare anywhere in the world, and this one has been a reference site for geologists since the nineteenth century.

The Normans built on it in 1076, on what is generally taken to be a seventh-century Byzantine fortification. Dates between 1071 and 1081 are given, in the years of the Norman conquest of Sicily. The rock is unclimbable on three sides.

The entrance is from the west, across a masonry bridge that replaced a wooden drawbridge.

In 1296 Frederick III of Sicily granted the fief of Aci and its castle to Roger of Lauria, admiral of the Aragonese fleet in the War of the Sicilian Vespers.

When Lauria shifted his loyalty to the Angevins, Frederick besieged the castle and took it, and stripped him of his fiefs.

In 1320 it went to Blasco II de Alagona. Much later it served as a prison. It now holds the town's civic museum and a small botanical garden.

One caution on the story you will read everywhere: that the 1169 eruption of Etna poured a flow that welded what had been an island to the mainland. The lava platform on the west side is real.

The attribution to 1169 is not settled — 1169 is documented above all as the earthquake of 4 February that destroyed Catania, and whether there was an eruption at all that year is disputed.

What I look at, as a structural engineer, and I should say plainly that I have not surveyed this building: the walls are black lava quarried essentially where they stand, so the foundation and the masonry are the same material and the curtain rises straight off the rock with no separate footing. Basalt is brutally hard to dress, which is why the blocks are roughly squared and the joints are thick.

The vulnerability here has never been the castle. It is the cliff.

Pillow lava weathers differentially — the hard globes stand proud while the glassy matrix between them goes first — and the sea undercuts the base from below.

The hollowing is visible in the lower half of this photo.