Description of the attraction
The Chembalo Fortress is a powerful defensive structure. The favorable location on the shore of the Balaklava Bay has become a significant help for builders and designers: sheer cliffs and raging waves of the open sea have become a natural protective background for the walls surrounding the Fortress Mountain from three sides at once.
The lower tower of this complex can also be seen from the modern part of the city. The notch in the wall reminds of a memorial plaque taken away by the Italians in the middle of the 19th century, but the carved Latin cross is still the object of symbolic decoration of the tower.
The tower stands at the junction of two walls, one of which opens the way to the keep, the main tower on the Fortress Hill. The other ends at the coastal cliff. The condition of the first wall can be called satisfactory, and even good. You can take an excursion or a walk along it - it will lead to the next tower with an interesting fate.
The tower was originally conceived as a three-walled building to monitor life inside the garrison, but a final fourth wall was subsequently built. It differs from its stone neighbors in a different nature of the masonry. Like most of the towers in the fortress, from the outside it looks semicircular for outsiders, and an absolute rectangle for its inhabitants.
The road along the wall will lead to two more half-towers. The buildings are almost completely destroyed, and official archaeological work on Chembalo has not yet been carried out.
However, those who wish can see the most important tower, the donjon, with their own eyes, because it has survived better than the rest of the buildings of the fortress. An unusual design with a truncated cone of the basement floor, forming a "skirt", was once an effective method of protection against ram attacks.
This tower was supposed to become a safe haven for the besieged, so the builders also took care of the comfort of those who were in it. For example, it is here that the center of the city water supply system, a storage tank with ceramic pipes, is organized. It was filled from the source of the Spilia mountain called Kefalo-Vrisi - "the head of the source". In addition to the wonders of the basement floor, the wooden beams of the inter-storey floors have come down to us in excellent condition - apparently, the main tower is three-storey and with a flat roof.
