While historians of Ottoman architecture have begun to examine the development of fortification systems in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Thys-Şenocak, Ostapchuk and Finkel), the process of commissioning and constructing military architecture in the later years of the empire remains relatively unexamined. This paper will specifically address the role of one provincial power-holder—Tepedelenli Ali Pasha—in the defense and negotiation of a maritime frontier zone at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over his more than thirty year tenure as the governor of Ottoman Epirus, Ali Pasha launched an ambitious building program of military works that included the repair and construction of no less than eleven fortifications along the Ionian coast, what is now Albania and northern Greece. Contemporaneous European travel accounts as well as later military historians often disparage the effectiveness of Ali Pasha’s coastal fortifications, citing their bad design and poor construction. In this paper, I aim to re-consider these structures, not according to the more pragmatic concerns of their defensibility against modern artillery and siege tactics, but more in light of their “image power,” i.e. how Ali Pasha’s fortifications would have appeared at a distance, especially to his neighbors on the Ionian Islands. I argue that the governor prioritized a fort’s ability to demarcate political territory and serve as a prophylactic to deter potential invaders, rather than performance in combat. By the end of the eighteenth century, expertise in European military engineering, especially in the tradition of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (d. 1707), was a much sought-for commodity. For several of his fortifications, Ali Pasha brought in European architects to get what he considered to be the best in technological know-how. Interestingly, the views of the pasha sometimes clashed with these hired consultants when their proposals—although technically sound—proved to be visually under-whelming. This paper utilizes documents from diplomatic archives, including an unpublished report by one of the French engineers who was sent to serve Ali Pasha, as well as a careful examination of how the architectural monuments themselves are situated in the broader topography. With this material, I consider the more performative aspects of constructing military works, noting how coastal fortifications were designed not only to defend but also to serve as icons of power, marking the liquid landscape.