The Fortress Villages

The mastic monopoly built villages, and the villages are still standing, and they are among the most remarkable survivals of medieval domestic architecture anywhere in Europe.

The Mastichochoria, the mastic villages, are traditionally counted as twenty-four. The best preserved are Mesta, Pyrgi, and Olympi; the others include Kalamoti, Armolia, Vessa, Elata, Lithi, Patrika, Nenita, Kataraktis, Vouno, and Didyma. The Genoese did not found all of them, but they systematically fortified — and in several cases replanned from the ground up — the settlements of the mastic zone in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and they did so for two reasons that reinforced each other.

The first was defence. Turkish raids and, later, corsair raids were a permanent condition of Aegean life, and a raid that carried off a village's population carried off the Maona's producers. The second was administration, and it was never stated in the regulations because it did not need to be: a walled village with one gate is a village whose produce can be counted on the way out.

The design principle is consistent, ingenious, and slightly sinister. The village is built as a single continuous structure. The outermost ring of houses is the wall: their outer faces are blank, windowless at ground level, thick, and unbroken, so that the settlement presents a solid stone cliff to anyone approaching. There are one or two gates and no other way in. Inside, the houses are packed against one another in a tight grid or radial plan, with streets so narrow that in places they cease to be streets at all and become tunnels, roofed over by the rooms above and braced by connecting arches thrown across at first-floor level — which gained floor space, stiffened the whole mass against earthquakes, and, not incidentally, turned the interior into a labyrinth in which an attacker who got through the gate would find himself in the dark, in a passage a metre wide, with people above him.

At the centre stands the tower, the pyrgos: a tall solid keep of last resort, into which the population could withdraw if the outer ring were breached, and in which, in some villages, the mastic itself was stored. The roofs were built flat and continuous so that defenders could move across the entire village at roof level, and in emergencies the houses were entered from above by ladder.

Mesta is the most completely preserved, and walking into it is a genuinely disorienting experience. The outer ring is unbroken. The lanes are dim vaulted passages that turn back on themselves. The plan is confusing on purpose and remains confusing after several visits. And it is not a monument or a reconstruction — it is a fortress that people have simply gone on living in for six hundred years, with satellite dishes on the towers and cats asleep in the tunnels.

Pyrgi is the famous one, for an entirely different reason. Every building around its square and along its lanes is covered, wall to wall and ground to roofline, in xysta: a sgraffito decoration made by applying a coat of black volcanic sand mixed with lime over the render, covering that with white lime wash, and then scraping the wash away with a fork or comb to reveal the dark layer in patterns. Triangles, zigzags, diamonds, chevrons, rosettes, in black and white, over every surface of every façade. The technique is Italian in origin — sgraffito was a Genoese and Tuscan decorative practice — and the Chians took it, applied it at a scale no Italian ever attempted, and made it entirely their own. The effect in the small square, beside the thirteenth-century church of the Holy Apostles, a miniature of the Nea Moni type, is like nothing else in Greece.

Olympi keeps its central tower most completely, standing free in the middle of the village square with the houses ringed round it.

Pyrgi also carries the island's most persistent piece of wishful thinking: that Columbus's family came from there, that a specific house in the village can be identified as theirs, and that the discoverer of the Americas was therefore Chian. There is no documentary basis for it whatever; Columbus's Genoese origins are as well established as those of any fifteenth-century commoner. But the mastic connection described in the last chapter is real, and it is a better story than the invented one.