Tower of the Winds

The Tower of the Winds is 12 metres (39 ft) tall and has a diameter of about 8 metres (26 ft). In antiquity it was topped by a weather vane-like Triton that indicated the wind direction.[3] Below the frieze depicting the eight wind deities—Boreas (N), Kaikias (NE), Apeliotes (E), Eurus (SE), Notus (S), Livas (SW), Zephyrus (W), and Skiron (NW)—there are eight sundials.[3] In its interior, time was determined by a water clock, driven by water coming down from the Acropolis. Research has shown that the considerable height of the tower was motivated by the intention to place the sundials and the wind-vane at a visible height on the Agora, effectively making it an early example of a clocktower.[4] According to the testimony of Vitruvius and Varro, Andronicus of Cyrrhus designed the structure.[5] The tower's columns bore capitals of a design now known as "Tower of the Winds Corinthian", although they lack the volutes ordinarily found in Corinthian capitals.

In early Christian times, the building was used as the bell-tower of an Eastern Orthodox church. At Ottoman rule time it was buried up to half its height, and traces of this can be observed in the interior, where Turkish inscriptions may be found on the walls. It was fully excavated in the 19th century by the Archaeological Society of Athens. The thesis that there was an Athens Mevlevi Convent or its ritual hall in the Tower and that the other buildings belonging to the Convent were located around it is an unsubstantiated claim and fabrication. The Tower, which was converted into a Qadirî tekke sometime between 1749 and 1751, was used by Qadirî dervishes to perform their religious rituals for 70 years between 1751 and 1821, and was evacuated after the Greek revolt of 1821.

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  Inside: Roof of tower
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  Inside: Floor of tower showing holes for mechanism
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  General view of the tower, from Stuart & Revett's The Antiquities of Athens, 1762
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  18th-century reconstruction of the Tower of the Winds from The Antiquities of Athens
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  Turkish Kadiri dervishes perform their religious rituals in the building in April 1805.

The building became better known outside Greece when details were published in London in the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (which also described four other ancient Greek buildings). It had been surveyed by James "Athenian" Stuart and Nicholas Revett on an expedition in 1751–54.

Several buildings are based on the design of the Towers of the Winds, including:

• The 18th-century Tower of the Winds on top of the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, England,
• St Pancras Church (1822) designed by William Inwood and his son Henry William Inwood, located in Euston, London. This is a unique Greek-revival church, that features two sets of Caryatids and a tower that was based on the classical Tower of the Winds.
• The Daniel S. Schanck Observatory (1865) an early astronomical observatory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
• The mausoleum of the founder of the Greek National Library Panayis Vagliano at West Norwood Cemetery, London.
• The 15th-century Torre del Marzocco in Livorno.
• The tower on St Luke's Church, West Norwood, in London, designed by Francis Octavius Bedford after he visited Athens on a Society of Dilettanti scholarship circa 1810.
• A similar tower in Sevastopol, built in 1849.
• The Temple of the Winds, which stands in the grounds of Mount Stewart near Newtownards in Northern Ireland.[6]
• The Carnaby Temple near Carnaby, East Riding of Yorkshire, built in 1770.
• The Maitland Robinson building in Downing College, Cambridge, designed by Quinlan Terry in 1992.
• The "Storm Tower" in Bude, Cornwall (1835), by George Wightwick
• The chapel of the Flanders Field American Cemetery built in 1930 in Waregem, Belgium, by Paul Cret.[7]

• Anemoi
• Antikythera mechanism
• Classical compass winds
• History of timekeeping devices

• Noble, Joseph V.; de Solla Price, Derek J. (1968). "The Water Clock in the Tower of the Winds". American Journal of Archaeology. 72 (4): 345–355. doi:10.2307/503828. ISSN 0002-9114. JSTOR 503828. S2CID 193112893 – via JSTOR.

• Beresford, James (2015). "A Monument to the Winds". Navigation News. London: Royal Institute of Navigation. pp. 17–19. Retrieved May 20, 2021.
• Webb, Pamela A. (2017). "The Tower of the Winds in Athens: Greeks, Romans, Christians, and Muslims; Two Millennia of Continual Use". Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press. 270.
• Duru, Dr. Riza (2021). “The Tower of Winds was neither the Mevlevi Convent of Athens nor Its Ritual Hall”. https://www.academia.edu/45679939.

Media related to Tower of the Winds at Wikimedia Commons

• Tower of the Winds and characters sculpted on it