Tower houses, Vathi, Mani.

Mani tower houses are three or four storeys high and were built in the early 1800s. Intense feuding lead the Maniots to build them narrower and taller, with mounting cannons, rendering Vatheia an architectural archetype. With no-one to keep order, disputes and vendettas were common. But they had a very coherent system of marrying and transmitting property to maintain a semblance of order. The evolution of this clan system was a direct response to the limited resources created by overpopulation, which led in turn to the near - starvation subsistence, observed by those who later travelled to the area, "Maniots living only a knife's edge away from starvation". Small wonder, then, that the Maniots exploited the peninsula's position on the shipping lanes linking Italy and the Aegean to add slave-trading and piracy to their more legitimate commerce., by DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY