Chios Island
The town of Chios makes no great impression when first seen from the sea. It has for so long been of commercial importance that it has assumed the nondescript appearance of a busy port in any part of the world - though not nearly such a busy one as it was fifty years ago. Even the harbour has been reduced in size by encroaching modern buildings and quays. As for the architecture, there was a vicious earthquake in 1881 which demolished any building of character, and the redevelopment then and in this century has been haphazard and unimaginative. The approach from the airport - only a mile away to the south - takes you through more attractive suburbs which have kept their greenery intact, and the parko (or municipal gardens) be¬yond the Plateia Vounakiou is a relief from drabness.
It is some time before you realize that the slightly higher ground to the north of the harbour is occupied by a large kastro, mainly because the walls have been reduced to a height little more than that of the surrounding houses. Unlike the fortress at Mytilene, its central space still encloses the remains of the old Turkish quarter, with typically narrow and disorderly streets. The ring of walls, though, is still distinct, and so are the lower courses of towers and gates built by the Giustiniani family in the fourteenth century; their arms can be seen at several of the gates. Like most of the Aegean islands Chios had Venetian masters for a time after 1204, but the Giustiniani captured it for Genoa in 1261. Their first occupation was brief, but after some vicissitudes they returned in 1344 to found a chartered company to
exploit its trade. The family and the company prospered until the Turks ejected them in 1566, and even then the island remained un¬troubled and prosperous for nearly two hundred and fifty years.
If the town of Chios is dull, that is not true of the rest of the island. Scenically it is magnificent. The rock formations are basically vol¬canic, and the tops are bare, but the deep green valleys which lace the crags are a continual excitement to the traveller. Chios has one of the best road systems in the islands, and there are buses from the centre of the town to the main outlying villages, though to see them and the countryside properly you need to hire a car or moped.
Twelve miles out of the town to the west is one of the most famous establishments of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Nea Moni, or ‘New Monastery’, founded by royal decree of the Emperor Constan-tine Monomachos in the middle of the eleventh century. The short journey there illustrates at once the special excitements of Chian scenery. In what seems a few minutes the road whisks you from sea level to something like two thousand feet up in the Provation moun¬tains, to find the monastery buildings at the head of a deep pine-clad ravine, with a stunning view down to the eastern sea.
The story of its founding is one of those lovely Greek fairy-tales which live on and deserve retelling in full. Briefly though, there were three hermits living in these mountains who came in mysterious circumstances upon an ikon of the Virgin Mary, round which they built their cells and a small church (the ‘old monastery’). In a vision she prophesied to one of the hermits that Constantine would shortly regain the throne of Byzantium for his family. As he happened to be in exile on Lesbos at the time, the hermits visited him and extracted a promise that if the prophecy came true he would build a new church on the site of their discovery. It did come true, and as Constantine IX he set about fulfilling his promise. He sent one of his best architects to Chios with authority to employ the finest artists and materials available. The church was begun in 1042 and took twelve years to build, though the emperor died before it was finished. His original decree, sealed with a golden seal, is in the monastery library.
The church we see today has survived many disasters, from plun¬der by Saracens in the thirteenth century to a savage ransacking by the Turks in 1822 and the final catastrophe of the 1881 earthquake. Time and destruction have spoilt the impact of the exterior. The western tower, originally detached, was added in 1502; though its proportions are good, the upper levels had to be rebuilt after the earthquake. The church itself is disappointing from the outside: the
walls are covered with a dull stucco, and the reconstituted central tower is lifeless.
Inside much has been lost, especially in the outer narthex, which was added by Constantine’s sister-in-law the Empress Theodora after his death. Once the vaulting was covered with brightly coloured frescos, but most of these and the upper parts of the rich purple stonework were wrecked by the Turks. The domed inner narthex is a different matter. It was part of Constantine’s original building, and there are some striking mosaic decorations to lift the spirit. The most vivid scene stretches across the top of the north wall, a fluid and animated picture of Christ washing his disciples’ feet. Opposite it to
the south is the Betrayal in the Garden, while Lazarus is resurrected over the entrance to the main church.
Even these mosaics do not compare with what meets the eye as you pass through into this splendid chamber. You have to remember that practically the whole of the central tower collapsed in 1881 and was rebuilt in 1900. Yet you can still see the masterly way the central dome was erected on an octagonal base, and the whole set in the stone framework dictated by the outer walls. The figure of Christ Pantocrator has disappeared from the centre of the dome, but all the way round its lower parts the mosaics have been restored to an astonishing brilliance in gold, blues, browns and reds. They are all scenes from the life of Christ, and none is more telling than the Baptism, an imaginative conception with Christ’s body showing through rippling water as he stands shoulder-deep in the river. The Crucifixion has a wonderful group of mourning women, while the Deposition from the Cross is a representation unique in Greece; the face of St John alone is profoundly moving. These are the original mosaics commissioned by Constantine and executed by experts from Byzantium. That so much has survived is astonishing, and we owe a lot to Bishop Phostinos of Chios, who soon after the last war pre¬served and restored what remained.
In front of the triple eastern apse stands an unusually small templo, built in Pentelic marble. This was happily installed by the Archae¬ological Foundation of Greece to replace a more ornate one built in 1907, and it is simple enough not to compete for attention with the mosaics. Nor does it overpower the holy and historic ikon which occupies the traditional position to the right of the main sanctuary entrance. Of the original painting you can see only the tiny head of the Virgin, though the beaten silver sheath which covers the rest reproduces the eloquent position of the hands - empty, but seemingly looking for a Child to hold.
Since its miraculous discovery, the ikon has had many miraculous adventures, being rescued from the attention of the iconoclasts in the ninth century, surviving impious arrows and disastrous fires, or hid¬den in the roof of the tower during a Turkish attack. Our Lady is now a part of the monastery family, and it is most endearing to hear one of the nuns having what sounds like a morning gossip with the Mother of God.
Of the monastery buildings the most evocative is the Refectory, built in the seventeenth century to accommodate eighty monks. A great stone table with fixed stone benches extends the whole length
of the room, and as in the monastery on Patmos there are pigeon¬holes down both sides for the monks to store their platters and cut¬lery. Now there are only six nuns in residence, for as part of the reorganization after the war the Nea Moni was declared a convent under the supervision of an Abbess.
The most impressive secular building is the underground water cistern, with a roof supported on fifteen arches springing from a double row of columns. It is contemporary with the church, and imitates the one attached to Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The oddest place is the Chapel of the Holy Cross, just inside the present entrance to the monastery. It was built in the Middle Ages for the use of women, who were not otherwise allowed within the precincts; the nuns today keep it fresh and sweet-smelling with flowers and herbs, but at the west end there is a rather gruesome display in a glass case of the bones of people killed here in the Turkish massacre of 1822.
The year 1822 is a date you cannot avoid in any account of the history of Chios. In 1821 the men of Samos persuaded their neigh¬bours the Chians to join them at the outbreak of the War of Inde¬pendence. Although on the whole they had prospered under Turkish rule they agreed to rise, but the campaign misfired. In revenge the Turks massacred 25,000 Chians and enslaved nearly twice as many, as well as wrecking many of the finest monuments of the Orthodox Church. The island of Psara nearby was treated just as ruthlessly, and survivors from both islands - industrious and well educated people — sailed across to Syros and built the new city of Ermoupolis below its mediaeval acropolis. The immediate riposte by Admiral Kanaris, who blew up the Turkish flagship inside Chios harbour, was little comfort, but Turkish brutality caused such a stir in Europe that most countries for the first time took the Greek cause seriously. De¬lacroix’s picture ‘The Massacre of Chios’ had something of the same effect as the war paintings of Goya, and though the original is in the Louvre there is a copy in the Chios museum - ironically now housed in a Turkish mosque near the Plateia Vounakiou.
The southern parts of Chios are on the whole less rugged and more fertile than the north, though no less beautiful. It was here that in earlier days the chief wealth of the island was produced - from the growth and export of citrus fruit and mastic resin. A network of roads leads south from Chios town, and the long fertile plain, or Kampos, through which they pass was once the home of rich Chians who built their comfortable and ornamental houses in the centre of their estates of olive, lemon and orange groves. Most of these estates have been
cleared away to make room for the airport, but you can still see a few crumbling mansions behind high stone walls, and in early summer the pervasive scent of the blossom spreads on the breeze.
Beyond the Kampos you reach a more rolling landscape of farms and small villages. One of these is Vaviloi, and you should not miss a short detour from here along the byroad which leads to Sklavia. About a mile out of Vaviloi a sign directs you to the church of the Panagia tis Krinis (Our Lady of the Fountain). This is a lovely surprise at the end of a sandy lane - a low building in warm pinkish stone with ‘romanesque’ arches picked out in decorative brick tiling. It was a daughter foundation of the Nea Moni and not many years later in date. Like Nea Moni it lost its central tower in 1881, but here it has been more sensitively restored. The Greek Arts Ministry has taken the church under its wing, and the series of magnificent but dilapidated frescos inside are being carefully and painstakingly ex¬amined and classified before restoration. These are mostly thirteenth-century paintings, though there are a few eighteenth-century additions in a typically allegorical vein. The interior was officially closed to visitors for some time, though you may be lucky enough now to find the presiding archaeologist at work there. If so, you should be careful to treat both him and the church with the respect they so much deserve.
You rejoin the main road just before Tholopotamion, and it crosses the southern slopes of Mt Likouri before reaching more fertile farm¬land around the small town of Pirgi. Already you will have noticed beside the road specimens of the Chian ‘mastic tree’ - actually an evergreen bush rising to about six feet in height. It is grown commer¬cially for its resin, or gum, which is collected and brought into centres like Pirgi from surrounding farms. The plant is botanically identified as Pistacia lentiscus, ‘a dense aromatic shrub of 1-3 me¬tres, with dark green leaves of two to six pairs of elliptic leaflets’.* Both flowers and fruit are initially red, and make quite a show in spring and autumn.
The resin is collected from incisions made in the bark, and solidi¬fies into what look like crystal teardrops. For an unknown reason this solidifying process occurs only when the shrub is grown in Chios - it has been tried elsewhere without success. It has had manifold uses, of which the most general has been in the making of chewing gum,
something as popular in classical times and with the odalisques of the Sultan’s harem as it has been throughout the modern world. It has been used in medicine to treat rheumatism, toothache and gout, and as an ingredient in picture varnish. Unluckily for Chios, synthetic varnishes and whatever American manufacturers put in their chewing gum have largely ruined the trade. Locally it is still the basis of a popular sweet and a liqueur, but the ouzo-like mastika, is rarely drunk and hard to come by - only the rather sticky liqueur is sold.
Pirgi is more than a mastic centre. Its unique character derives from the style of exterior house decoration known as sgraffito. Natu¬ralistic designs are scratched on the stucco, and a geometric pattern of white and grey paint applied to the surface - often the whole front wall of a house. The larger houses surround a central plateia, domi¬nated by a large and uninteresting ‘metropolitan’ church. At the east end of the square is the narrow entrance to the ancient church of Agii Apostoli, another gem of the twelfth century, with brick tile decora¬tion similar to that at the Panagia tis Krinis.
The Apostles were Peter and Paul, so several panels of frescos show scenes from their lives, including a nice view of Paul and Silas in the stocks. Most of the frescos were done in 1665 by a master of the Cretan school called Domestikos, but there are some much earlier fragments of a twelfth-century ikon of the two saints, restored and mounted on canvas. They were casualties of the Turkish savagery in 1822, though the ‘mastic villages’ were spared the worst effects because the harems wanted to preserve their sources of the gum. At the highest point of the town the central keep of a Genoese castle has been partly converted to domestic use.
The defensive character of these southern villages is more obvious when you come to Olymboi, which also has a central keep and houses which have been incorporated in an outer ring of walls. Another striking example is Mesta, a few miles further along the road to the west. You can enter it through several arched gateways in the outer wall, but you can only reach the central plateia by follow¬ing narrow alleyways which often tunnel their way under three-storey houses. It is an extraordinary survival, built when pirate at¬tacks on the south coast could be expected at any time. Both Olymboi and Mesta are built on plateaux raised above the coastal plain, but invisible from the sea. Mesta too has a church worth discovering, that of the Taxiarchis, with a fourteenth-century east end and more brick tilework, though its west end is a modern extension. The templo inside is a delight, small but high, and of intricately carved fifteenth-
century woodwork. Some of the mediaeval houses have been con¬verted into accommodation for visitors, and it would be a wonderful place to stay in an authentic Greek island atmosphere.
You would also have a pleasant outlet to the sea at Limin Meston, or Limani as it is usually called. Here there is a substantial harbour, big enough to take small freighters for repair. There are fishing boats too, of course, and just a few houses round the waterfront with rooms to let. Beside the approach road to the harbour there is an excellent little restaurant with a few tables set on a shady terrace above the road.
As a diversion from the main road you can reach the ancient port of Emborio by a turn-off to the left just before Pirgi. This was an important Bronze Age settlement, a rival perhaps of Troy.
Between the eighth and sixth centuries BC there was a Greek city with an acropolis on the hill of Prophitis Ilias north of the harbour. The whole site was excavated by the British School from 1951 to 1954, including an archaic temple of the sixth century near the har¬bour. Underwater exploration revealed its importance in the wine trade, at least, when amphorae were found with origins as far apart as Attica, Rhodes, Kos and Thasos.
Only two roads penetrate the mountainous north, where the land¬scape is dominated by the two great peaks of Mt Oros, at 3500 feet, and Mt Prophitis Ilias at just on 4000 feet. South of the main massif a twenty-five-mile drive takes you through wildish country to Volissos, a small hill town which curls round another ruined kastro, and to the harbour below at Limnia. This is a simple place with one taverna, frequented by Greek families from Volissos, and with rooms to let. It is useful too as the starting point for a local ferry service to Psara, a passage of seventeen miles. This island has always been closely linked to Chios, and has some claims on history, beginning with Mycenaean tombs of the thirteenth century BC, but mostly arising from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD, when the Psariots took every opportunity of harrying the Turks. Like the Chiots they were fine seamen, with an excellent harbour on the south coast, and they sided with the Russian fleet under Admiral Orloff in the Russo-Turkish war of 1770-5, an adventure they got away with because Turkish reprisals were thwarted by stormy weather. Admiral Kanaris, hero of the later Greek resistance, was born here in 1785.
They finally overreached themselves when the War of Inde¬pendence broke out in 1821. The Turks were infuriated by their raids on the mainland coast, and in 1824 they suffered the same fate as the
Chians had two years earlier. Fourteen thousand Janissaries landed to deal with a population of about the same number, whereupon the islanders blew up their own powder magazines and only 3000 es¬caped. Many of them joined the Chians in founding the city of Ermoupolis in Syros. Today you find little life and few comforts on Psara, but the southern anchorage is a safe and peaceful place to lie up for a day or two.
The other main route to the north is aimed at Kardamila, a sizeable town close to several harbours in a conveniently indented coastline. It is the reputed birthplace of Homer, and of all the seven cities who have claimed the honour it seems to be the general favourite. The classic support for the claim is in the anonymous Hymn to Apollo, written probably during the archaic period to introduce a recitation from the Iliad or the Odyssey:
Tell me, maidens, of poets that visit here
who sings to you the sweetest, whom do you hold most
dear? Remember me then, one answer, one only giving: ‘A man that is blind, in scarry Chios living, supreme in song, both now and in times to come.’*
Byron’s line in ‘The Bride of Abydos’ picks up the tradition:
The blind old man of Scio’s rocky isle.
It may be too easy to imagine a relationship between scenery and poetry, but the sweeping grandeur of Homer’s hexameters reminds us, however, illogically, of the mighty mountains and winding val¬leys of Chios.
This is not to say it is sensible to connect particular scenes or objects visible today with famous figures of the past - the ‘plane tree of Hippocrates’ in Kos, or the ‘house of Sappho’ in Mytilene. So when you read that a massive block of stone, on an outcrop beside the road out of Chios to the north, was where Homer sat to teach his pupils, you will probably (if reluctantly) accept the modern view that it was the base of a temple to Cybele.
The original town of Chios has now spread to join its northern neighbour Vrontado, and the two form a sprawling community
stretching some three miles along the coast. Vrontado itself, now a residential suburb of Chios, has a small yacht harbour and some popular beaches. Beyond it the road follows the corniche between Mt Kenavros and the sea to reach two villages of character. First comes Mantoukios, the simplest of fishing harbours with a huge plane tree which has its feet almost in the water. Then Langada, a bigger place with a fleet of brightly painted boats bobbing alongside the quay. Most of them have a little lugsail furled round a flimsy gaff which they clearly use when weather allows, and just a pair of oars - no engine or outboard motor.
From Langada you have a good view of the Oinousses Islands, which are served by a daily boat from Chios harbour. This arrange¬ment is largely for the convenience of the staff and pupils of the Navtiko Gymnasio, the only nautical boarding school in Greece -similar as an idea to the San Giorgio training school in Venice. Apart from the school there are various conveniences in the main harbour of Oinoussae, and it makes an interesting day’s excursion.
At Kardamila you will find no Homeric clues, but a pleasant small town, popular with the Greeks for holiday houses and com¬manding the seaside village of Marmaro. It is worth exploring the upper part of the town, where modern houses give way to a ruined mediaeval quarter. Marmaro is disappointingly plain after Man¬toukios and Langada, but beyond the next headland you come to Nagos, which is quite natural and unspoilt. There is no harbour but a long sandy beach overlooked by a very good little restaurant.
That is the last of the coastal villages, but it would be a mistake to turn back now. A new road has been built along the northern flanks of the highest mountain range in Chios, and even without an objective it makes a glorious drive. The road crosses valleys which run from high in the mountains right down to the sea, and the views either way are superb. At four thousand feet (probably two thousand feet above you) this Prophitis Ilias is the handsomest of his kind. Before reaching the present end of the road at Kambia you pass a couple of other villages, but for most of the way you will see nothing but mountains, trees and the sea far below. Somewhere above you was a sanctuary of Apollo, and that is company enough.
An Ionian rather than an Aeolian origin and background seems to have directed the culture of Chios to more practical, or at least tangible, ends. Sculpture rather than poetry was its main interest, and a school of that very Greek art flourished there in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, while a local artisan called Glaucus was the first to
discover how to weld iron.* This practical bent was also put to commercial uses: Chios was the first Greek city to enter the slave trade, even before Delos, and by the end of the Peloponnesian War only Sparta had more domestic slaves.
The verdict of Thucydides was that ‘of all others, only the people of Chios seem to me happy and full of common sense’. This is as true today as it was in the fifth century BC. They are also a vigorous people, swift of response and quick to offer help to strangers. To come to Chios and to live among its people even for a short time is a vivid experience.