Byzantine Tower MOC

 Welcome back to another travel in time. This time we go back to the Eastern Roman Empire to take a look at my latest MOC. It is a watchtower that controls a pathway. Let's take a look at it.

Months ago I was looking for inspiration to build an Eastern Roman Empire (from now on Byzantines) and I came across a picture that catched my eye. It was the ruins of a Byzantine tower sorrounded by plants due the pass of the time and the lack of maintenance over the centuries. Inspiration to build a tower with a pathway next to it came to my mind inmediatly. And it had to be like a mountain pass so the terrain isn't just a plain boring one. It must be as cool or even better than the tower itself! 

These towers were made to control important trails and places. The territory of the Byzantine Empire was a hard one to defend so they had to fight invasions and pirates. These kind of towers contributed to do so. The picture I found and inspired me is a tower from a wall from the castle of Rentina located in Greece. So the tower itself isn't as I represented it and mine isn't the representation of a real one this time but there were many of them across the territories of the Byzantine Empire so I bet some had designs and locations very close to that one. To learn more about the castle of Rentina you should take a look here: https://www.kastra.eu/castleen.php?kastro=redina

The picture that inspired the whole MOC. Couldn't find the picture on Google now months after I took the picture to my computer screen

Sources: Kastra.eu and TripAdvisor

Because the tower from the inspiration picture is in ruins I searched for other towers that survived better the past of the time and I found this one you see above called Nea Fokea. It is placed in Greece some kilometers to the south of the Rentina castle and it is in an awesome state! It is in the coast and looks like it was used to defend a farm from raids coming from the sea. I guess you can visit it and go inside. A place I would like to visit in the future! So I build my tower with the same shape but I made it shorter. The real ones seem to have 3 floors and the roof to shot from. I don't know if the floor under the door is able to be used as a basement or they are full of stones until the height were the door starts. Anyway mine has a floor less. I did it like that so the build looks better. The more I build the less detail I can put in my builds because I don't have that much parts as I would need to build it as best as I can. With one more floor I was afraid too that the turret looked like is too much for the little build this MOC is. I also added a tree next to it which I think improves a lot the MOC but it would be stupid in the real towers because someone could hide under the tree and you wouldn't spot them from the tower. These are the liitle changes I did this time that prioritize the LEGO build over the historical accuracy.

Now talking about the build itself I really wanted to do this MOC for months since I pursched half a year ago some accesories from Loongbrick to create Byzantine soldiers. As you may know I love all related to Romans and even the medieval era isn't my favourite and it is not even close I really like to study the Byzantine Empire and I wanted to build some stuff about them too. The accessories you see here are from Loongbrick and the spears and shields are from AliExpress and then hand-painted by me. My Byzantine minifigs are among my favourite minifigs of the ones I can create and I love how they look in this MOC which by the way I think is my first proper medieval and Byzantine MOC. The build was fun to do. I love how the rock parts look. The tower itself too. Tree was again an improvisation and I'm happy with how it looks like.

Here you can take a look at how step the terrain is.

The building technic I used is the same I usually use with the sloped borders. This is probably the best way it looks with dark bluish gray and light bluish gray colors representing the rocky terrain of a mountain. There are normal bricks and plates behind it and tiles and slopes over them giving some overall slope to the borders. I like some studs to be seen so it looks more irregular as real mountain terrains look like. In fact you can see one side of the build looks more "clean" and regular with more slopes and tiles and the other 3 sides look more irregular specially the opposite one. Every 2 studs the parts you put at 90 degrees (a brick with a slope or plate put on one of its sides) end at the same time so when the side bricks end at odd numbers the final look isn't that good but overall I think the stepped terrain looks good and has a good height. Here you can see a couple pictures of the process. I think they can be very useful if someone wants to use it too.

The base of the tower

And now here you can see all the pictures I took in its original quality. There is as always a YouTube video for this build. At the end of this post you have it.

My new YouTube banner. Do you like it?