The Shape of the Island

Begin with the rock, because on Chios the rock explains almost everything that follows.

The island runs some fifty kilometres north to south and between thirteen and twenty-nine east to west, a long grey vertebra of limestone and schist lying parallel to the Anatolian coast. Its northern half is severe country. Mount Pelinaion rises to nearly thirteen hundred metres, and the land around it is bare, wind-scoured, and thin-soiled, beautiful in the way a quarry is beautiful and almost entirely useless for agriculture. In antiquity it carried timber on its slopes; the timber was cut, and what remains is stone, scrub, terraces built by people long dead, and villages perched high enough to see a sail coming from a long way off.

Below a line drawn roughly from Lithi on the west coast to Kalamoti in the east, the island changes character entirely. The geology softens to a more permeable limestone, the land flattens into low hills and small plains, and the microclimate warms and steadies. And in this southern zone — and, as far as anyone has ever established, nowhere else on earth in quantity worth harvesting — the mastic tree weeps.

The botanical facts deserve stating plainly, because the economic history of the island rests on them. Pistacia lentiscus, the lentisk, is one of the commonest shrubs of the Mediterranean basin; it grows in scrubland from Portugal to Syria, and anyone who has walked through Mediterranean maquis in August has brushed past it. Cut its bark anywhere and it will produce a little resin. But only in southern Chios, in the variety the botanists call var. Chia, does the plant yield resin in the volume, purity, and aromatic quality that turn it from a curiosity into a commodity.

Agronomists have argued about why for two hundred years. The candidate explanations combine the particular limestone substrate; the specific pattern of dry summer heat and night humidity that the southern plain enjoys and the northern mountains do not; the shelter that those mountains provide from the north wind; and — probably most importantly — two millennia of human selection, in which growers propagated from the trees that gave most and best, until the Chian lentisk became something functionally distinct from its wild cousins. Whatever the mechanism, the outcome has been tested repeatedly and brutally. The Genoese tried to establish mastic elsewhere. The Ottomans tried. Nineteenth-century agronomists tried, in Anatolia, in North Africa, in the Levant. Columbus thought he had found it in the Caribbean and was wrong. Every attempt has failed, and the failures are themselves part of the island's mythology, retold with satisfaction in the mastic villages to this day.

So nature divided Chios in two, and the division has held for three thousand years. The north sends its sons to sea, because the land will not feed them; the south stays at home and tends a crop worth more by weight than silver. The two halves have had different dialects, different architecture, different patterns of marriage, and quite different relationships with whoever happened to be in charge. When the Ottomans massacred the island in 1822, they were careful to spare the southern villages, because you do not burn the field that pays your rent. That is why the medieval villages of the south survive intact today while the town and the great houses of the plain are nineteenth-century rebuilds standing on ash.

Then there is the strait. Chios faces the Erythraean peninsula — the Çeşme peninsula in modern Turkey — across water that narrows to about seven kilometres. Smyrna, which is to say İzmir, is a short sail north-east; Ephesus is not much further. For the whole of antiquity and the whole of the Ottoman period, Chios belonged to the coastal world of Asia Minor rather than to mainland Greece. Its trade ran east. Its dialect had Anatolian peculiarities that Herodotus noticed. Its intellectual life faced Smyrna. Its wealth came from being the point at which the Anatolian mainland met the sea lanes. And when, in 1922, the Greek presence in Asia Minor was extinguished, Chios lost its hinterland in a fortnight and had to reinvent itself facing the other way.

Finally, the harbours, which will matter more and more as this book proceeds. The main port lies on the east coast, facing Asia Minor, and has been the island's capital continuously since antiquity: the Genoese walled it, the Ottomans garrisoned it, the earthquake of 1881 flattened it, and it was rebuilt in the neoclassical style you see today. North of it lies Vrontados, a coastal village of shipwrights and captains. Further north again is Kardamyla, in a deep bay under the mountains, with its port at Marmaro. And off the north-eastern tip, across a narrow channel, lies a scatter of nine islets called the Oinousses, of which one is inhabited by fewer than a thousand people.

Hold those three names — Vrontados, Kardamyla, Oinousses. Everything in Part VII comes out of them.