
St. Augustine Tower Goa
Solitary forty-six-metre laterite belfry, last survivor of four towers of a ruined seventeenth-century church.
Location
About this audio guide
The guide to St. Augustine Tower in Goa opens four thousand miles away, with Queen Ketevan of the Georgian kingdom of Kakheti held hostage in the Persian court of Shah Abbas the First, refusing to renounce her faith or join his harem until her death in sixteen twenty-four. It follows two Augustinian friars who recovered part of her body in Shiraz and carried an arm bone back to their headquarters here in sixteen twenty-seven, sealing it in a stone tomb inside a church that would later lose three of its four towers. You'll hear how archaeologists searching the ruins in two thousand five reopened the question of where the rest of her had gone. Stand at the base of the tower and look up at the laterite that outlasted the church around it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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