Pyrgi

Interesting facts

The church of the Holy Apostles is covered inside with wall paintings made in 1665 by the Cretan painter Antonios Domestichos.

The Holy Apostles follows the octagonal plan of the katholikon of the Nea Moni monastery, a model copied in Chios churches for centuries.

The Holy Apostles was rebuilt in 1564 by the abbot Symeon, who later became metropolitan of Chios, on a church that may date from the 13th or 14th century.

Pyrgi's other historic churches include the Taxiarchis of 1680 and the church of the Virgin's Assumption of 1694.

Mastic is harvested only on Chios, and some twenty villages in the south of the island make up the mastic-growing region led by Pyrgi.

During the Chios massacre of 1822, the Ottoman authorities tried to spare the mastic villages because their resin underpinned the island's tax revenue.

Under Ottoman rule the mastic crop was sent to Constantinople in place of taxes, much of it reportedly destined for the ladies of the imperial harem.

Pyrgi served as the seat of the Mastichochoria municipality and has a small museum devoted to mastic.

Why it is worth it

In the south of the Greek island of Chios, the village of Pyrgi wraps its houses in a skin of geometric patterns. Facades along its narrow lanes are covered in grey and white designs of squares, triangles, circles, zigzags and stylised plants, repeated in bands from about door height upwards, which have earned Pyrgi the name of the painted village. The decoration is not painted at all but scratched: the local technique, called xysta, is a form of sgraffito. Over a base render the builders lay a coat mixed with black sand brought from nearby beaches, then a top coat of lime; while the lime is still fresh, the patterns are marked out with a compass and ruler and scraped away with a fork to reveal the darker layer beneath.

Pyrgi is among the largest villages on Chios and the traditional centre of the Mastichochoria, the mastic villages of the south. Their wealth came from mastic, the aromatic resin tapped from the lentisk shrub; the know-how of cultivating it was added to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. The village also gave its name to Chian earth, a fine white clay dug nearby that was prized since antiquity as an astringent and cosmetic.

The village is probably medieval and grew from several smaller settlements whose inhabitants gathered together for protection from pirate raids; documents mention it from the eleventh century onwards. Its plan is that of a fortress: tightly packed houses, streets bridged by arches and vaults, and at the centre a tower about 18 metres high from the Genoese period, once enclosed by a square wall with towers at the corners. The oldest of its three historic churches, the Holy Apostles, probably dates from the fifteenth century. Because the earthquake of 1881 spared Pyrgi, its medieval layout survives almost intact. The village has around a thousand inhabitants.

Getting there

Pyrgi lies in the south of Chios, about 20 km in a straight line, or roughly 25 km by road, south of Chios town, the island's capital and main port. The nearest airport is Chios Island National Airport (JKH), about 18 km to the north.

From the encyclopaedia

Pyrgi is a village on the Greek island of Chios, known as the "painted village" on account of the decoration of the houses. This mostly consists of black and white decorative motifs in different shapes. Pyrgi is one of the biggest villages in Chios, located in the south part of the island, 25 km south of the island's capital. It is the traditional seat of the Mastic Villages, a group of villages where the residents engage with mastic agriculture. These villages have been added in representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO. The population of Pyrgi is 1,063 inhabitants according to the 2021 census.

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Pyrgi

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

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From the encyclopaedia