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. In late summer farmers cut the bark and wait for the resin to drip onto ground swept clean beneath. The industry has PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) status. For centuries mastic was the chewing gum of the eastern Mediterranean and a personal luxury of the Ottoman sultans. It is still used in ice cream, in bread, 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 its village square is decorated with xysta, geometric patterns of black sand etched into white lime plaster, and the effect is more North African than Greek. Mesta, walled and dense, keeps its medieval defensive plan 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, the stronghold at the centre.

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. In the Ottoman massacre of 1822, in retaliation for the Greek uprising, most of the island’s population was killed or enslaved. It is the subject of one of Delacroix’s most celebrated paintings, now in the Louvre. The Argenti Folklore Museum in Chios town has a copy and explains the local background.

Chios town is a working port, not a resort. Stay three nights, hire a car and eat at one of the small fish places in Mesta. Chios is one of seven places in the Greek world that claim to be Homer’s birthplace, so come for the mastic rather than for Homer.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Chios National Airport (JKH) lies 3 kilometres south of the town, and Aegean, Olympic Air and Sky Express fly from Athens all year. By sea, the Hellenic Seaways Blue Star Mykonos sails from Piraeus to Chios in roughly 13.5 hours, by way of Syros, Mykonos and Samos, and goes on to Mytilene, Limnos and Kavala. It sails twice a week each way and carries vehicles.

  2. The address

    Argentikon at Kampos is the Argenti family palazzo of 1550, destroyed in 1822 and restored from 1920 by Filippo Argenti with the British architect Arnold Smith. It has eight suites in five stone buildings on an estate of 32,000 square metres, and it is a listed historic monument. For a farm stay, Perleas Mansion, from 1640, has eight rooms within 17 acres of working organic citrus grove.

  3. The resin

    Pistacia lentiscus var. Chia, the mastic tree, grows in commercial quantity only on the southern third of the island. The Chios Mastiha Growers Association, the cooperative of all 24 mastichochoria, or mastic villages, and roughly 4,500 growers, packs and trades the resin under a 1997 PDO, a protected designation of origin. UNESCO added the know-how to its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. The trees are cut from July, and the tears of resin are gathered by hand once they harden on the ground.

  4. Nea Moni

    Constantine IX Monomachos and Empress Zoe founded Nea Moni between 1042 and 1055, 15 kilometres west of Chios town on the slope of Mount Provateio. Its katholikon, the main church, is one of the few surviving examples of the octagonal island plan. Its gold-ground mosaics, with those at Daphni and Hosios Loukas, define the Macedonian Renaissance. It has been on the UNESCO list since 1990. It was stormed in 1822, and three nuns live there today.

  5. The painted village

    Pyrgi is the painted village. Its xysta facades are made by scraping white lime plaster off a layer of dark sand beneath, in patterns taken from carpets of the Genoese centuries, 1346 to 1566. Mesta, 35 kilometres south-west of Chios town, is the sterner partner: a five-sided medieval village whose outer ring of houses forms the wall. Its streets are too narrow for a vehicle, and its central church, the Older Taxiarchi, dates from 1794.

  6. Mavra Volia

    The black-pebble beach at Emporio, 30 kilometres south of Chios town, takes its colour from the long-extinct Psaronas volcano. It is two coves in a row below steep cliffs, the second called Foki, reached on foot from the small harbour. There are no umbrellas and no canteen at the water, and lunch is in the village above. Bring shade, soft shoes for the pebbles, and a tender to arrive by when the wind is calm.

  7. The kitchens

    Hotzas, at Kondyli 3 in Chios town, has been the Linos family kitchen since 1882. Yiannis Linos cooks and his wife Olga runs the room, mixing Chian dishes such as mastelo and handmade pasta with dishes from Constantinople. The signature is yahni beans with mandarin purée. At Avgonyma, the medieval village 462 metres up the western slope, To Asteri serves coq au vin and baby goat with sage on a terrace open to the Aegean sunset.

  8. Anavatos

    Anavatos is a deserted Byzantine tower village on a granite spur 450 metres high, in the centre of the island 16 kilometres west of Chios town. Its name means inaccessible. When it was besieged in April 1822, its people were either taken or chose the cliff, and the 1881 earthquake finished what survived. The Taxiarchis church still stands; the stone houses do not. It is a serious counterweight to the southern villages. Walk it at first light, before the rock gives off its heat.

  9. The Argenti Museum

    The Korais Library on Korai Street in Chios town was founded in 1792 under the guidance of Adamantios Korais. Its upper floors house the Philip Argenti Folklore Museum and Picture Gallery. Philip Argenti founded the Argenti Society in 1932 to gather the island’s record, and the present rooms opened in 1962. The collection holds a genuine Delacroix lithograph of the Massacre of Chios, the elder sibling of the canvas in the Louvre, with costumes, portraits and the family donations.

  10. Oinousses

    Oinousses is a cluster of nine islands 2 kilometres off the north-east coast, home of Greek shipping families: Lemos, Pateras, Lyras, Hadjipateras. More than 1,500 captains have trained at its Merchant Marine Academy, founded in 1965. The Maritime Museum, also opened in 1965 and rebuilt in 1991 in the Pantelis A. Lemos building, holds Napoleonic-era ship models carved by French prisoners of war. It is a day trip by tender from Chios town, harbour to harbour.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Chios Town

    Chios Town has the main harbour on the east coast, built around the island’s medieval castle. It is the gateway to the mainland and the Aegean, with the ferries, the commerce, the tourist boats and the Chios Marina all here. A yacht lies below the walls of the Kastro, in the working capital that the trade in mastic, the island’s tree resin, and the shipping fortunes ran from for centuries.

  2. Limenas

    Limenas, the port of Mesta on the southwest coast, is one of the newest harbours on the island: a modern port completed in 2015, 35 kilometres from the town, serving the ferries and the smaller craft. It is the port for the mastic country, and Mesta itself, the walled medieval village of the Mastichochoria (the mastic villages), stands a few kilometres inland. A yacht lies here for the south and the resin villages.

  3. Volissos

    Volissos is the largest village in the northwest, climbing to a Byzantine castle with six round towers; local tradition names it as Homer’s home, where the poet is said to have lived and worked. Its harbour lies below at Limnia, the crossing point for Psara. A yacht lies off the small port, with the castle on the hill above and the emptiest coast of Chios around it.

  4. Kardamyla

    Kardamyla is in the northeast, with its harbour at Marmaro along one side of the bay. It is one of the two home villages of the Chian shipowners, the captains’ town whose sons crewed and owned the merchant fleets, and its houses, shops and square line the waterfront. A yacht lies in the bay of a town that sent its men to sea for generations and watched this shore for their return.

Mythology

  1. Homer

    The Homeric Hymn to Apollo has its speaker name himself ‘a blind man’ who ‘dwells in rocky Chios,’ and Thucydides took the line as Homer’s own word. Later tradition placed a guild on the island, the Homeridae, who traced their line to him and worshipped a hero called Homeros.

  2. Orion

    On Chios, Orion seeks to marry Merope, daughter of Oinopion, but Oinopion makes the giant drunk, blinds him in his sleep and throws him onto the shore. Orion comes back after the sun restores his sight, but Oinopion is hidden underground.