One of my great grandfathers,

as we all have four of the kind, organized armed escorts for mule caravans traveling from Caesaria, deep in Anatolia, to Constantinople ( Istanbul for you). This must have been around or even before the 1850s. He made a lot of money in this job, which he increased by playing the Bourse in Istanbul, stock market you would call it now. He decided he should build a manor back in his ancestral village, commensurate to his status.

He bought an orchard, he built a high stone wall all around it and a monumental gate and ordered a lot of wood and construction materials which duly arrived via mule caravans, and were stored in the orchard waiting for the builders.
He was supposed to be on his last trip to Istanbul, when he decided to increase his money by playing the Bourse one more time. He managed to loose practically everything and was back to square number one, escorting caravans from Caesaria to Istanbul for the next twenty years, and never recovered enough to build his manor. After he died, my great grandmother lived by selling the construction materials from the orchard with the impressive monumental gate.

I often think of him when I see the half finished structures that dot the countryside in Greece, skeletons of summer houses never to be built.