Chios
Chios is the only place on earth where the mastic tree, a particular variety of Pistacia lentiscus, weeps aromatic resin in commercial quantities. The trees grow in the southern third of the island, the harvest happens in late summer when farmers cut the bark and wait for the resin to drip onto cleaned ground, and the industry is PDO-protected. Mastic was the chewing gum of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries and the personal luxury of Ottoman sultans, and is still used today in ice cream, in breads, in the liqueur mastiha, and in the toothpaste in your hotel bathroom. Drink the liqueur cold after dinner.
The mastichochoria, the fortified mastic villages, are the architectural reason to come. Pyrgi is the most photographed: every house on the village square is decorated with xysta, geometric patterns of black sand etched into white lime plaster, the effect more North African than Greek. Mesta, walled and dense, has its medieval defensive plan still intact: an outer ring of houses forms the walls, the inner lanes are too narrow for a vehicle, and the central church is the keep.
Nea Moni, the eleventh-century monastery in the central mountains, holds gold-ground Byzantine mosaics commissioned by the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. They are UNESCO-listed and among the finest surviving mosaics outside Hagia Sophia. The 1822 Ottoman massacre, in which most of the island's population was killed or enslaved in retaliation for the Greek uprising, is the subject of one of Delacroix's most celebrated paintings, now in the Louvre. The Argenti Folklore Museum in Chios town keeps a copy and the local context.
Chios town is a working port, not a resort. Three nights, a hire car, and a meal at one of the small fish places in Mesta. The Homeric birthplace claim is one of seven across the Greek world; arrive expecting mastic, not Homer.
House Notes
Arrival
Chios National Airport (JKH) sits three kilometres south of the town; Aegean, Olympic Air and Sky Express handle the Athens route year-round. By sea, the Hellenic Seaways Blue Star Mykonos runs Piraeus to Chios in roughly 13.5 hours via Syros, Mykonos and Samos, continuing on to Mytilene, Limnos and Kavala. Two sailings a week each way; vehicles carried.
The address
Argentikon at Kampos — the Argenti family palazzo of 1550, destroyed in 1822 and restored from 1920 by Filippo Argenti with the British architect Arnold Smith — holds eight suites in five stone buildings on a 32,000-square-metre estate, designated a historic monument by the Ministry of Culture. For an agrotourism register, Perleas Mansion, 1640, runs eight rooms inside seventeen acres of working organic citrus grove.
The resin
Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia grows in commercial quantity only on the southern third of the island. The Chios Mastiha Growers Association — the cooperative of all twenty-four mastichochoria, roughly 4,500 grower-members — packages and trades the resin under a 1997 PDO. UNESCO inscribed the know-how on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. The harvest cuts run from July; the tears are collected by hand once the resin has hardened on the ground.
Nea Moni
Founded by Constantine IX Monomachos and Empress Zoe between 1042 and 1055, Nea Moni sits fifteen kilometres west of Chios town on the slope of Mount Provateio. The katholikon is one of the few surviving examples of the octagonal insular plan, and its gold-ground mosaics — together with those at Daphni and Hosios Loukas — define the Macedonian Renaissance. UNESCO-listed since 1990. Stormed in 1822, three nuns in residence today.
The painted village
Pyrgi is the painted village — the xysta facades are made by scraping white lime plaster off a layer of dark sand beneath, the pattern carpet-derived from the Genoese centuries (1346 to 1566). Mesta, thirty-five kilometres south-west of Chios town, is the sterner counter-piece: a pentagonal medieval village whose outer ring of houses forms the wall, the streets too narrow for a vehicle, the central church of the Older Taxiarchi from 1794.
Mavra Volia
The black-pebble beach at Emporio, thirty kilometres south of Chios town, draws its colour from the long-extinct Psaronas volcano. Two consecutive coves below abrupt cliffs, the second known as Foki, reached on foot from the small harbour. No umbrellas, no canteen at the water; the village above for lunch. Bring shade, soft shoes for the pebble, and a tender for arrival under a calm wind.
The kitchens
Hotzas at Kondyli 3 in Chios town has been the family kitchen of the Linos house since 1882; the present generation, Yiannis Linos cooking and his wife Olga at the door, threads Chian dishes (mastelo, hand-made pasta) with Constantinopolitan ones — yahni beans with mandarin purée the signature. At Avgonyma, the medieval village 462 metres up the western flank, To Asteri runs coq-au-vin and baby goat with sage from a terrace open to the Aegean sunset.
Anavatos
The granite spur rises 450 metres on the central island, sixteen kilometres west of Chios town — a deserted Byzantine tower-village whose name means inaccessible. Besieged in April 1822, the inhabitants either taken or chosen the cliff; the 1881 earthquake finished what survived. The Taxiarchis church stands; the stone houses do not. A serious counter-weight to the southern villages, walked at first light before the heat comes off the rock.
The Argenti Museum
The Korais Library on Korai Street in Chios town, founded in 1792 under Adamantios Korais's guidance, houses the Philip Argenti Folklore Museum and Picture Gallery on its upper floors. Philip Argenti founded the Argenti Society in 1932 to gather the island's record; the present rooms opened in 1962. The collection holds a genuine Delacroix lithograph of the Massacre of Chios — the Louvre canvas's elder sibling — alongside costumes, portraits and the family donations.
Oinousses
A cluster of nine islands two kilometres off the north-east coast — the seat of Greek shipping dynasties (Lemos, Pateras, Lyras, Hadjipateras), the alma mater of more than 1,500 captains through the Merchant Marine Academy founded in 1965. The Maritime Museum, also opened 1965 and rebuilt in 1991 in the Pantelis A. Lemos building, holds Napoleonic-era ship models carved by French prisoners of war. A day-crossing by tender from Chios town, harbour to harbour.