Three Minutes in 1881

On the afternoon of 3 April 1881, Chios was struck by a violent earthquake.

The epicentre lay on or immediately beside the island. Modern estimates put the magnitude somewhere in the region of 6.5 to 7. The shaking lasted, by survivors' accounts, less than a minute, and when it stopped, the town of Chios had ceased to exist as a functioning place, along with a great many of the villages and most of what had been rebuilt at Kambos since 1822.

Casualty figures vary widely — contemporary reports range from about three and a half thousand dead to over seven thousand, out of an island population that had recovered to perhaps sixty thousand. Thousands more were injured and the overwhelming majority of survivors were homeless. Fires broke out in the ruins. Aftershocks continued for weeks, driving people to sleep outdoors into the summer.

The damage list reads as a catalogue of everything the massacre had spared or that had been rebuilt in the sixty years since. The Kastro was severely damaged. The Ottoman administrative buildings came down. Churches, mosques, and schools fell. At Nea Moni, the dome collapsed — taking with it the eleventh-century Pantocrator that had looked down through that unobstructed octagonal space for eight hundred and forty years — and the belfry came down with it. At Kambos, where a generation of diaspora money had painstakingly restored the burned mansions, houses were wrecked again, and this time many of them were left as roofless shells and never rebuilt at all.

The response was, once again, driven from abroad. Relief funds were raised in Constantinople, Smyrna, Athens, London, Odessa, and Marseille, overwhelmingly through the Chian merchant network; the Ottoman government contributed; and rebuilding proceeded through the 1880s on a plan revised for seismic safety, with wider streets and lower buildings.

That is why modern Chios town does not look like a place with three thousand years of history. It is a handsome late-nineteenth-century neoclassical town, because between 1822 and 1881 the island lost first its people and then its buildings. What survives from earlier is what was too far from the epicentre or too valuable to burn: the mastic villages, the church at Nea Moni, long stretches of the Kastro walls, and the roofless shells behind the red walls of the plain.