For Chios, geography is destiny, often a blessing, and at times a curse. The island sits astride history’s key trade routes, where Asia’s silk roads end across the strait at Smyrna. A short sail away are the Dardenelles and Bosporus, which have been the roads to riches, both gold in Colchis, and the golden grain of the Ukrainian steppes. To the south there is Egypt, and its cotton which the Chiots transported with such aplomb in the nineteenth century. To the west, there are the wonders of Italy, France, and the Atlantic world. Chiots were there, among the first, and the most commercially successful.
Though born to both the sea and to commerce given its geographic destiny, nature was also generous to the island. Citrus, silk, and other products abounded and provided export revenue, but nothing compares to the mastic resin that emerges only from trees in the south of the island, and nowhere else—on earth.
An island magnet for conquerors
Because of its geographical and natural endowments, Chios was a magnet for conquerors, particularly after the temporary dismemberment (yet permanent weakening) of Byzantium after the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Genoese left a lasting cultural imprint, with their Maona system of commerce, and many Genoese families, went native.
Taking over in 1566, the Turks took care not to kill the goose laying the golden eggs. For much of the Ottoman era, Chios was the property of the Sultana, and its mastic harvest brought not only prosperity, but a degree of autonomy. As Greeks began to become more assertive in the global economy, particularly in the eighteenth centuries, so did Chiots, establishing merchant colonies in key locations in the Ottoman, Austrian, and Russian Empires, and later France, Britain, and the United States.
With economic agency came the drive for national agency. Not just commerce flowed from Trieste, Vienna, or Marseilles, but ideas of freedom. Efstratios Argenti, scion of a wealthy Chiot merchant dynasty, and his compatriot Antonis Koronios, were strangled by the Turks in Belgrade in 1798, along with their better-known leader, Rhigas Pheraios, for daring to dream of a resurrected, republican Byzantium.
Trying to balance survival and freedom
Once the Philike Etairia came on the scene, in 1814, and spread throughout the Diaspora and the Ottoman Empire, Chiots joined. But geography dictated discretion. Chios was all too aware of its hideous vulnerability to the full wrath of Turkish revenge, as well as its wealth and benefits with the Turkish status quo. The revolution might succeed in the Peloponnesus, on the other side of the Aegean, connected to the Greek mainland by an easily defensible isthmus, and defended by the “wooden walls” of Hydra’s and Spetses’ fleets. Though stalwart Psara was just a few miles west of Chios, it was not enough to prevent the Turks’ landing on an island separated by a mere strait from the vastness of Asia.
Today when the plane from Athens lands, it skirts the Greek side of the strait, and the Turkish homes are almost as close to you as the Greek ones. This proximity brings Turks as tourists, generally polite and substantial spenders, even as a considerable Greek military presence can be found in the fastness of the Chios mountains, as well as an overworked coast guard handling Europe’s immigration front line.
Chios Massacre – the great butchery
In 1822, the Turks came to massacre, and the degree of butchery reduced an island of 120,000, the size of New York City at the time, to under 10,000 starving souls, with the rest killed, enslaved, or refugees rescued by the Greek fleets to Psara, Syros, the Greek mainland, and to the Chios network throughout the Mediterranean. Some orphans even made it to America, where in the mid-1800s they, along with the Chios merchants, formed the vast majority of America’s still-tiny Greek population.
To walk through the kalderimia of Chios’ fortress, with its narrow streets partially covered by second-story hayatis (enclosed, shuttered balconies), is an experience both architecturally pleasant, yet filled with ghosts. The thick fortress entrance contains a dungeon, where successive Chiot notables, merchants with global reach, met their deaths, including many families whose names would become ubiquitous in global commerce.
On a lovely Spring day, as a guest of the municipality, I traveled over Chios’ mountain spine, to the Monastery of Nea Moni, a Byzantine treasure which also experienced the 1822 tragedy, one passes discreet military installations. On the western side of the escarpment, with the heroic isle of Psara lying in a misty proximity, we approach fortified villages, such as Anavatos, the Mystra of the Aegean, where the besieged women recalled the courage of their compatriots in Souli, preferring a death over the cliffs to slaughter and slavery.
Chios’s merchants girdle the globe
My journey to Chios was to study these merchants, to understand the island they called home. While building businesses and fortunes abroad, they did not forget their stricken home island. They endowed schools, academies, the Koraes Library, https://www.koraeslibrary.gr/en/library/history the third largest research library in Greece, where I spent much of my time ably and hospitably assisted by their brilliant director.
Due south of Chios’ Chora (main town) is the Kambos, the merchant’s “suburb” where their high-walled, red stone mansions with arched gates recall Genoa, replete with wells and orchards, rows of oranges and lemons, recalling a merchant aristocracy whose reach covered four continents, and many of their descendants have merged into the upper classes of Britain, France, Austria, and the United States, though they still recall their roots, and return, as if in pilgrimage, to their ancestral island, to beautiful and citrus-laden ancestral homes, or to churches founded by their families, such as Agios Andreas Argenti, honoring a family member martyred by the Turks. Argentis and their relatives from the four corners of the earth met in 2022 to commemorate family lost in Chios’ Holocaust.
Everywhere in Chios, nature’s hardiness and beauty reminded me of its people, from the vast mastika orchards to the tiny flower blooming through rocks at Nea Moni. Resilient and rooted, even far from home.
*Alexander Billinis is a PhD candidate in Digital History at Clemson University South Carolina, USA, sand a lecturer in Political Science. He is also a writer with a background in journalism and historical analysis and a regular contributor to Neos Kosmos.
