Balkan tower houses (singular: Albanian: kullë; Bosnian: odžak, Bulgarian: кули, kuli; Serbian: кула, Romanian: culă) are a distinct type of fortified residential structures built primarily between the 17th and 20th centuries.
Main Issues with current tagging scheme:
Currently, these structures are inconsistently tagged in OSM (e.g., historic=manor, historic=castle, building=tower or even man_made=tower), leading to confusion and loss of cultural/historical context. OSM lacks a specific tag for tower houses, despite their historical and architectural significance. Although some regional variations exist, the term itself and the building it refers to can be admired across the Balkans, but no unifying tagging scheme exists for it.
Why choose a unifying tag?
While their aspect is similar, other characteristics of Balkan tower houses range vastly across the peninsula:
- In Romania (specifically the Romanian provinces of Oltenia and Muntenia) they were built by boyars and served a defensive purpose, while also acting as a residence for the owner of the respective estate.
- In Albania, for example, their building was not reserved to the elites and they were more used as a clan residence, or as a defensive structure for persons involved in blood feuds.
However, what we can see in both cases (which can be extended to Bulgaria, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia etc.) is that they irrevocably served a dual purpose, both as a permanent residence and as a defence against either Ottoman raids, blood feuds, local skirmishes etc.
Another unifying factor is their relative architectural uniformity. Most of them have a rectangular shape, are typically made of stone, are between 2 to 4 storeys tall, with thick walls, small windows and sometimes arrow-holes.
We can also note that they were often part of a family compound, reflecting the extended family structure and local power dynamics.
Proposed solutions
Tower houses fit the OSM definition of historic=castle: “fortified residences of a lord or noble” and the castle_type=kula subtag would distinguish them from other types of castles, as well as other types of medieval tower houses.
This would create a dedicated tag for this distinct architectural type. Thus, we can avoid ambiguity with larger castles or fortresses. It would provide clearer semantics for data users (e.g., historians, tourists) and would have potential for broader adoption (e.g., tower houses as seen in the rest of Europe). However, this would not solve the initial problem, and would require its own separate subtag (maybe tower_house=kula), as the intention was to clearly define and tag this certain architectural type, and the differences over Europe are vast.
This would have all the benefits of the previous option, but may block or slow the future editing process. If, in the future, tower houses as they are described in literature may want to be united under one tag, with subtags for each regional variant, the historic=kula tag would prove itself to be problematic.
but I saw that the :type nomenclature scheme is very often used in OSM tags so I thought to include it too, I really don’t know the difference, it looks messy imo.
