The roofed lanes
Stone tunnels with arches linking facing houses.
**Villages built to protect the most valuable crop in the Mediterranean โ and the fortification was economic as much as military.** โ **The crop**: **mastic** is a resin exuded by the **mastic bush**, **and only southern Chios produces it commercially** โ not nearby Turkey, not anywhere else, even though the plant itself grows all round the Mediterranean. **That natural monopoly** made it an extraordinarily valuable commodity: used as chewing gum, medicine, flavouring and perfume, **and in high demand in Constantinople and the Ottoman court**. โ **The fortification**: when the **Genoese** ruled Chios (1346โ1566) **they organised production** and built some **twenty fortified villages** in the mastic region โ **Mesta, Pyrgi and Olympi** the best known. **The aim was to protect the crop and its workers from pirate raids**, which were constant in the Aegean. โ **The design is uniform**: interlocked outer houses without windows, a single gate, a central tower and a maze of lanes. โ **The monopoly continued under the Ottomans**: the villages held special privileges in return for delivering the mastic โ **which is the context of the 1822 massacre**.
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**A medieval fortified village with no windows facing outward โ its outer houses are its wall** โ in southern Chios, and the best preserved of the mastic villages. The **Genoese** built it in the 14th century to a strict defensive logic: **the outer houses stand back to back**, forming a solid wall with no openings, with **a single gate** that could be shut and **a central tower** everyone could retreat into. โ Inside it is **a genuine maze**: narrow lanes **roofed by stone arches** tying opposite houses together, so you walk through half-dark tunnels that turn with no apparent logic โ **which is the point**, to lose an invader. โ At its centre stand the large **church of the Archangel Michael** and a small square with cafรฉs under a tree. โ And it is **still inhabited** and alive, not a restored attraction. โ Do not try to drive into it.
Stone tunnels with arches linking facing houses.
A large church with a carved iconostasis at the village's heart.
A solid, windowless row of houses forming the village wall.
Mesta, 82102 Chios, Greece