The view from the road
Village and rock as one mass, barely separable from the mountain.
**Yes — provided you know what happened there and behave accordingly.** ✅ **Why the visit is legitimate**: Anavatos is **a site of memory open to the public**, and visiting it respectfully is **an act of remembrance**, not an intrusion; the island itself preserves rather than hides it. ✅ **What you should know before climbing**: that this village **lost most of its people in the 1822 massacre** — and that the ruins you photograph **were particular people's houses**, not scenery. ⚠ **What is not appropriate**: treating it as a «ruin exploration» site — **climbing on walls**, going inside houses, staged photography within them, and noise. ⚠ **There is a practical dimension too**: all of that **is genuinely dangerous** because of the cliff and the collapses. ✅ **What is appropriate**: walking quietly, reading whatever is posted at the entrance, **and visiting Nea Moni the same day** — the ossuary chapel there completes the story. ✅ **The effect**: standing in a silent place like this does what a page of history cannot.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
**An abandoned stone village on the summit of a vertical rock, the colour of the mountain itself** — a few kilometres from Nea Moni, and Chios's most dramatic and heaviest site. It was built on a **rock with a drop of some three hundred metres** on three sides, its houses of **the same local stone**, so that from a distance you can barely separate village from cliff — which was the intention: **a village that could not be seen**. ⚠ **It is abandoned**: only a negligible number of residents remain. The first cause was the **1822 massacre**, in which it lost most of its people; the rest drifted away over time. ⚠ **The village today is genuine ruin**: fallen roofs, collapsed walls, missing floors, ⚠ **and the cliff is unrailed over most of its length**. ✅ But the view from it, and of it from the road, are both extraordinary.
Village and rock as one mass, barely separable from the mountain.
Climbing paths between empty houses with fallen roofs.
The valley, the mountains and Nea Moni on the horizon from the top.
Anavatos, 82100 Chios, Greece