Kambos: The Making of an Aristocracy

South of Chios town, on the coastal plain between the sea and the first rise of the hills, lies Kambos — the word means simply "the plain" — and it is the most beautiful thing the Genoese centuries left behind. It is also the physical embodiment of a social order, and to understand Chian society from the fourteenth century to the twentieth you have to understand what happened on this stretch of ground.

Start with the soil, which is why anyone came here at all. The plain is deep alluvium, several metres of it, washed down over millennia from the hills behind — a rarity on an island that is mostly rock — and beneath it lies accessible groundwater. It is, in other words, one of the very few places on Chios where intensive irrigated horticulture is physically possible, and it lies within an hour's walk of the harbour. Whoever controlled Kambos controlled the island's only serious agricultural surplus outside the mastic zone, and could ship it.

From the Genoese period onward the plain was developed as an intensive citrus plantation, and this was a deliberate and capital-hungry choice. Citrus is not a peasant crop. Orange, lemon, mandarin, citron, and bergamot trees take years to come into bearing, require constant water through the dry summer, need protection from wind and frost, and repay the investment only if the fruit can be got to a market that will pay for it. Kambos worked because the Genoese had the capital to make the initial investment, the engineering to solve the water problem, and — crucially — the ships and the commercial network to sell Chian citrus in Constantinople, Smyrna, Odessa, and eventually Trieste and Marseille. It was, from the beginning, an export business dressed as a garden.

The arrangement they built has a form so consistent that once you have seen one estate you can read all of them.

Each property is enclosed within a high wall of the local sandstone, quarried on the island, which weathers to a warm reddish-ochre and gives Kambos its extraordinary colour: mile after mile of narrow lane between red-gold walls, with dark citrus foliage rising above them and nothing else visible. The walls are not decorative. They break the wind, which would otherwise strip and scar the fruit; they maintain the humid microclimate inside; they mark the property with absolute precision; and they keep people out.

Behind the wall stands the house — the archontiko, the lord's house — of two or three storeys, built of the same sandstone, with an arcaded loggia on the garden side, carved stone door and window surrounds, an armorial escutcheon set over the gate, and a monumental arched gateway wide enough for a cart. The courtyard is paved in votsalota, black-and-white pebble mosaic laid in geometric or heraldic patterns, and beside or behind it are the service buildings: the stables, the pressing floor, the storerooms, the quarters for the workers.

And then the technology, which is what actually made the place possible. A well is sunk — sometimes to a considerable depth — and fitted with a manganos, a chain-of-pots water wheel. A blindfolded mule or horse walks a circular track, turning a horizontal wheel geared to a vertical one carrying an endless chain of earthenware jars, which dip, fill, rise, and spill into a channel at the top. From there the water runs into a great open stone cistern, often built ornamentally, with steps and a balustrade, and frequently large enough to swim in — which the families did, all summer, for generations. From the cistern, stone channels distribute the water through the grove by gravity on a strict rotation, quarter by quarter, tree by tree, on a schedule that in some households was written down and inherited.

Every nineteenth-century traveller who wrote about Chios wrote about the same two things: the creaking of the manganos, audible everywhere in Kambos on a summer afternoon, and the smell of orange blossom in April, which the visitors describe as almost overwhelming and which is one of the reasons the plain acquired a literary reputation quite disproportionate to its size.

Now the people, because Kambos is not really about oranges.

The estates were built by, and expressed the position of, the island's aristocracy — and Chios had one, which is itself unusual in the Greek world. Under the Genoese this was the Latin nobility: the Giustiniani in their many branches, together with the Greek families who married into them and the mixed houses that resulted. These people were not feudal lords in the northern European sense; they held no jurisdiction over peasants and swore no military service. They were something closer to a Genoese patriciate transplanted — merchant-nobles, shareholders in the Maona or its dependants, holding urban houses inside the Kastro for the winter and business, and a walled estate on the plain for the summer, for the produce, and for the display.

That combination — the town house and the country estate, commerce and land, trade and gentility — is a specifically Italian pattern, and Chios is one of the few places in the Greek world where it took root. It gave the island's elite a character quite unlike the merchant communities of the other Aegean islands. Chian notables had coats of arms carved over their gates. They kept genealogies. They had Latin as well as Greek. They understood themselves as an aristocracy in the European sense, and, remarkably, they went on understanding themselves that way for centuries after the political basis of the claim had disappeared.

Because here is the point that makes Kambos historically important rather than merely picturesque: the arrangement survived the Ottoman conquest of 1566 essentially intact.

The Maona was destroyed and the Giustiniani who governed were deported. But the estates on the plain were private property, and private property in land was precisely the thing the Ottoman system was most comfortable leaving alone, provided the taxes came in. The families stayed. They lost their political power and kept their houses, their groves, their water rights, their marriages, and their sense of themselves. Catholic branches went on being Catholic; Orthodox branches went on being Orthodox; both went on living behind the same red walls, and both went on marrying each other.

And over the following two and a half centuries, this aristocracy did something that European aristocracies almost never manage: it converted itself, without losing continuity, into a commercial bourgeoisie of international reach. The same families whose grandfathers had held shares in the Maona put their sons into trading houses. They sent them to Constantinople and Smyrna, then to Livorno and Trieste and Marseille, then to Odessa and Taganrog after Russia opened the Black Sea, then to London and Manchester and Calcutta. The estate on the plain remained the family seat — the place you came home to, married from, and were buried near — while the money was made a thousand miles away.

Read the names carved over the Kambos gates and you are reading, in advance, the commercial directories of nineteenth-century Odessa and the membership lists of the Greek community of Victorian London. Giustiniani. Argenti. Rodocanachi. Mavrogordato. Ralli. Petrocochino. Scaramanga. Sechiari. Schilizzi. Negroponte. Vlasto. Calvocoressi. Agelasto. Franghiadi. Prasakakis. Zygomalas. Philip Argenti's Libro d'Oro de la Noblesse de Chio traces them in exhaustive and slightly dizzying detail across two volumes: who married whom, in which generation, which branch went Catholic and which stayed Orthodox, which son went to Trieste and which stayed on the island. It is a genealogy of a class that thought of itself as noble, behaved like a merchant network, and was both.

That is the aristocratic root of everything in Parts VI and VII of this book. The Chian merchant houses that dominated the nineteenth-century grain trade were not self-made men who rose from nothing; they were an old landed elite that had spent four hundred years learning how to combine property, kinship, and international commerce, and that happened, at the moment when the Black Sea opened and Britain industrialised, to be perfectly positioned. And the shipping families of the twentieth century, though they came in the main from the northern villages rather than the plain, inherited the same social architecture: the family firm, the arranged marriage between houses, the branch office run by a brother, the fortune made abroad and displayed at home.