Stephen the Great's Tower, Piatra Neamț

Stephen the Great's Tower stands on Piața Libertății in Piatra Neamț, north-west of the Church of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, whose bell tower it is, within the Curtea Domnească complex. The stone inscription on its east wall records that the tower was built by Stephen the Great with his wife Maria and their son Bogdan and completed on 28 October 1499, a year after the church. It is a listed historic monument, LMI code NT-II-m-A-10567.03. The tower is built of rough stone and reinforced by four buttresses. It is about 19 m high and 5.8 m wide, square in plan up to a height of 7 m and then an octagon with unequal sides. Inside are five levels. The barrel-vaulted ground floor has its own entrance on the south side and does not connect with the upper floors; the town's old school was once housed here. Before the 2012 restoration, an external staircase led to the first level, and from there the original spiral stone staircase climbed to the bell chamber. In the late nineteenth century a watch gallery was added to the tower, followed by a clock with faces on all four sides. In 1954 the hipped shingle roof was replaced by a conical one, as part of the 1952-1956 restoration. The bell chamber holds four bells: a large one from the seventeenth century, one from the nineteenth century and two cast in 1979 at Târgu Neamț by the master founder Damian. A restoration completed in 2012, through a City Hall project with European funding, consolidated the foundations and masonry, rebuilt the wooden stairs to the bell and clock chamber, put the clock back into operation and put the clock and bell mechanisms on display. In August 2022 the tower was struck by lightning: the structure was not affected, but the interior electrical installation was destroyed.