Chios Today
The island. Chios has a permanent population of roughly fifty thousand, concentrated in the town and along the coasts, rising substantially in summer as the diaspora returns. It is a regional unit of the North Aegean, with Oinousses and Psara as separate municipalities.
Its economy rests on four things. Shipping, in both senses: the ownership described in the preceding chapters, and the very large number of Chians who serve at sea or work ashore in shipping offices in Piraeus, Athens, and London. Mastic. Agriculture — citrus, olives, figs, almonds, wine, and the celebrated tangerine of Kambos. And tourism, which is real but has never approached the intensity of the Cyclades or the Dodecanese; Chios has remained comparatively undeveloped, which visitors regard either as its greatest attraction or as its principal deficiency, depending entirely on the visitor.
Mastic. The resin economy survived everything and is now in better shape than it has been for a century.
Production is organised through the Chios Mastiha Growers Association, founded in 1938 as a compulsory cooperative uniting the producers of the mastic villages — some four to five thousand growers, depending on how one counts membership. The Association collects, grades, processes, and markets the entire crop. Which is to say that the monopoly is still intact; it has merely changed hands one final time, from the Genoese shareholders to the Valide Sultan to the growers themselves.
Chios Mastiha holds Protected Designation of Origin status under European law, restricting the name to resin produced in the designated area of southern Chios. In 2014, UNESCO inscribed "the know-how of cultivating mastic on the island of Chios" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — recognition of a continuously practised agricultural craft with an unbroken record of at least two and a half millennia. Very few living traditions anywhere can make that claim.
The commercial strategy since the 2000s has been to climb the value chain: instead of selling raw resin as a bulk ingredient to industrial buyers, the Association has developed branded consumer products — chewing gum, the mastiha liqueur, confectionery, cosmetics, oral care, and pharmaceutical preparations — and sells them through its own mastihashop retail chain in Greece and abroad. The Chios Mastic Museum, opened in 2016 above Pyrgi, presents the cultivation and its history.
There is also renewed clinical interest. Mastic's traditional use for digestive complaints has attracted modern investigation, including studies of its activity against Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium implicated in peptic ulcer disease, and of its anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties. The literature is suggestive rather than conclusive, and nobody should describe mastic as a proven treatment for anything on the strength of it. But there is a pleasing continuity in the fact that a resin prescribed by Dioscorides in the first century is being examined in twenty-first-century gastroenterology journals.
The fires of 2012. In August 2012, wildfires driven by high winds swept through southern Chios and burned a very large area of the mastic zone. Estimates of the damage varied, but a substantial proportion of the island's productive trees were destroyed or badly damaged, and production was cut for years afterwards. Because a mastic tree takes fifteen years or more to reach full yield, recovery has been slow and is still in progress; replanting has proceeded with state, European, and private support.
It was a hard reminder that the island's ancient monopoly rests on a fragile biological asset in a fire-prone Mediterranean landscape, and that a hotter and drier eastern Aegean is a direct commercial threat to something that has survived Persians, Romans, Genoese, and Ottomans.
The refugee crisis. And then the geography asserted itself again, in the most difficult way of all.
From 2015 the seven-kilometre strait that had made Chios a Genoese entrepôt, an Ottoman fiscal jewel, and an escape route in 1941 became one of the principal crossing points for people fleeing the Syrian civil war and conflicts across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Tens of thousands landed on the island's eastern beaches.
The initial response of the islanders was, by nearly every account, extraordinarily generous — and it is worth understanding why. Chios is an island whose own grandparents came ashore from Anatolia in 1922 with nothing, and whose collective memory contains, at no great distance, the experience of being the people in the boats. The islanders of the North Aegean were collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.
The situation then deteriorated, as it did across the eastern Aegean. The EU–Turkey statement of March 2016 halted onward movement to the Greek mainland, and the islands became holding zones rather than transit points. Camps at Vial, in the interior, and at Souda, beside the walls of the Kastro in the town, held populations far beyond their capacity for extended periods, in conditions that were repeatedly and severely criticised by UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, Human Rights Watch, and the Greek ombudsman. Tensions rose; there were incidents of violence; local opinion polarised between continued solidarity and simple exhaustion; and tourism, such as it was, suffered.
Arrivals fell after 2016 and again after 2020, and the camp system has since been reorganised into new closed facilities. The issue has not gone away and will not, because the strait is not going to move.
What the island actually is. A visitor arriving on Chios today finds a place strikingly unlike the Aegean of the imagination. There is no whitewashed village tumbling down a caldera. There is a large working town with a Genoese castle embedded in it and a handsome nineteenth-century grid around that. There is a ruined and half-restored district of red-walled orange plantations where the water wheels have stopped and the cisterns are full of weeds and, here and there, a house is immaculate and a family is in residence. There are two dozen medieval fortress villages in the south with black-and-white painted façades and tunnels for streets, still inhabited. There is an eleventh-century monastery with imperial mosaics and a box of skulls. There is a mountainous, empty north with deep harbours from which a disproportionate share of the world's cargo is directed. And offshore there is a small island of eight hundred people, a naval academy, and a very great deal of money.