Palamidi is the great fortress that crowns Nafplio, one of the finest Venetian strongholds anywhere in Greece. Built in just three years in the early eighteenth century on a rock some 200 metres above the town, it is not a single castle but a chain of eight self-contained bastions linked across the hilltop, reached by … Read more
Chios does its evenings the Greek way rather than the resort way. There are no vast clubs or foam parties here as on Mykonos or Ios; instead the night begins with the volta, the slow promenade along the harbour, moves through the ouzeri and tavernas, and ends in the music bars of the waterfront or, … Read more
Mastiha is the soul of Chios, an aromatic resin that grows in commercial quantity nowhere else on earth. Bled in pale tears from the bark of the mastic tree in the villages of the island’s south, it has been harvested for more than two thousand five hundred years, shaped the island’s history and wealth, and … Read more
Volissos is the stone showpiece of western Chios, a village of restored houses climbing an amphitheatre of hillside beneath a Byzantine castle, above the emptiest and most beautiful coast on the island. The largest settlement of the north-west, it is linked by an old tradition to Homer, guards a collection devoted to the legendary Ariousios … Read more
Kampos is a landscape unlike anywhere else in Greece: a fertile plain south of Chios Town given over entirely to walled estates, where high ochre-red walls hide mansions and orchards of mandarin, orange and lemon. Built by the Genoese and Greek merchant families who grew rich on the island’s citrus and mastic, these two hundred … Read more
Mesta is the finest surviving medieval village on Chios, a complete fortress-village whose plan has scarcely changed in six hundred years. Its houses stand shoulder to shoulder to form an outer wall, its narrow lanes twist and duck beneath stone arches in a deliberate labyrinth, and at its heart sits one of the largest churches … Read more
Pyrgi is the most photographed village on Chios, and no other village in Greece looks like it. Every house front in its medieval core is covered from ground to eaves in the black-and-white geometric patterns called xysta, scratched into the plaster in triangles, diamonds, zigzags and rosettes, so that the whole village reads as a … Read more
Anavatos is the most haunting place on Chios, a medieval village of grey stone stacked up a cliff that falls away almost vertically on three sides. Its houses climb in tiers to a ruined church at the summit, their walls merging so completely with the rock that from a distance the village is hard to … Read more
Chios shows a different face from the water. Much of its coast is reachable only by boat, from the secluded coves below the mastic villages to the clear bays of the satellite islands, and a day at sea trades the winding mountain roads for a slow cruise, a swim off the deck and a lunch … Read more
Chios is one of the finest Greek islands for walking, crossed by a dense network of old stone paths that once linked its villages, groves and monasteries. The mountainous north rises to Mount Pelinneo, the island’s summit, while the central hills hold the monastery of Nea Moni and the ghost village of Anavatos, and the … Read more