Behind the Red Walls

A word about what the Kambos estates were actually like to live in, because the documentary and architectural record is unusually rich and because the way of life it describes lasted, with modifications, into living memory.

The year had a shape. The family wintered in the town, inside the Kastro under the Genoese and in the town houses outside it later, where the business was, where the churches and schools were, and where society happened. In late spring they moved out to Kambos, and stayed until the autumn. The estate was a working farm and a summer residence at once, and the household included not only the family but the permanent workers who lived on the property, the seasonal labourers who came for the harvest and the irrigation, the gardener whose knowledge of the water rotation was frequently the most valuable expertise on the estate, and — under both Genoese and Ottoman rule — domestic slaves and later servants.

The houses were designed for heat. Thick sandstone walls, small windows on the sunward side, a loggia opening onto the garden where the family sat in the evening, high ceilings, tiled floors, and often a hayat or covered upper gallery running along the garden front. Cool storage was under the house. Water was everywhere and audible: the manganos turning, the cistern filling, the channels running.

The cistern deserves its own paragraph, because it is the emotional centre of the Kambos house and everybody who grew up in one says so. It is a large rectangular stone tank, sometimes twenty metres long, open to the sky, with a low wall around it and steps down into the water at one end. Its practical function is to buffer the irrigation supply, so that the wheel can turn all day and the water can be released in a controlled flood at the right hour. Its actual function, for three or four centuries, was that the children of the house swam in it. Photographs from the early twentieth century show whole families in the cisterns — grandmothers on the steps, boys jumping in from the wall — and the tradition is remembered with great affection by the diaspora families whose grandparents lived it.

Visitors' accounts, of which there are many from the sixteenth century onward, dwell on two things. The first is the extraordinary abundance: travellers describe walking for an hour under continuous citrus, in shade, with the fruit hanging within reach, and repeatedly reach for the word "paradise," which is not a metaphor but an etymology — the Greek paradeisos comes from an Old Persian word for exactly this, a walled irrigated garden. Kambos is a Persian walled garden, transplanted to a Greek island and financed by Italian capital, and it is worth pausing on the fact that all three of those traditions met here.

The second thing visitors dwell on is the women. Western travellers to Chios from the sixteenth century onward comment, at some length and with an astonishment that becomes comic in aggregate, on the freedom and visibility of Chian women — who appeared in public unveiled, conversed with strangers, went out in company, danced, and dressed in a distinctive and elaborate local costume that several visitors found improper and all of them described in detail. Chios acquired a reputation across early modern Europe as a place of remarkable social ease, and it is one of the reasons the island appears so often in travel literature and, later, in Orientalist painting.

The whole world of Kambos took two catastrophic blows and survived both in altered form. In 1822 the estates were burned and their families killed, enslaved, or scattered — the plain was one of the first places the Ottoman troops reached, because it was rich and close to the town. Through the middle decades of the nineteenth century diaspora money rebuilt it: houses restored, groves replanted, cisterns repaired, by families now living in Odessa and London who had no intention of losing the place they came from.

Then, on 3 April 1881, the earthquake brought a great deal of it down again, and much of what fell was never raised. That is why Kambos today is a district of contrasts that visitors find hard to parse: immaculately restored mansions with the family still in residence in August; working groves with the water running; ruined shells standing open to the sky behind intact gates; dry cisterns full of weeds; and everywhere the same red walls, running for kilometres along lanes barely wide enough for a car, giving nothing away.

It is, all things considered, the most atmospheric place in the Aegean, and one of the least visited.