Castellorizo
is a rocky island whose terrain is sharply divided into mountains, hills,
plateaus, valleys, streambeds - and only one real harbour, with two
smaller bays next to it. The village in which the
island's people lived was very densely built.
It
consisted, as Kyriakos Hondros tells us, of seven different quarters:
Mouragio, Kaoulaki, (or Pountos), Chorafia, Kavos, Myli, Palamferia and
Mandraki, where the boat yards was.
The
village stands on the northeast side of the island.
Kavos
seems to have been the first part of the village to be built. At Niftis
there were market gardens and vineyards.
Nearby,
at Nifatsi, was the modern cemetery
The
Municipal Market is a recent building, having been constructed under the
Italian occupation.
Today,
the inhabited part of the town is the Kordoni or rim of the harbour,
though some people still live in the Mandraki district. One further point:
it is only natural that conquerors should give their own names to
buildings they erect themselves, while in the case of other buildings they
generally corrupt the existing names.
This was the case with Castellorizo, whose castle was not built by d'
Heredia (though he did repair it) but in antiquity, by Sosciles, son of
Nicagor
When it is absent, everything
else fades, becomes shabby, and disappears.
But when the Castellorizians could work the sea, their cultural
achievements over time were such that no force can ever eradicate or even
dull them. No
matter what problems may be caused by the distance in time, no matter how
much evidence may have disappeared, what remains- in the memory, if
nowhere else- is so strong and so vigorous that the scholar will have no
difficulty in bringing it back to life. He will be helped by the traces
that have survived here and there, but above all by the soul of the people
of Castellorizo, which neither grows old nor forgets.
When the War of Independence
broke out, the people of Castellorizo rose in rebellion against their
Turkish masters despite the privileges, which the island had enjoyed.
According to tradition, some of the islanders were members of the Society
of Friends which prepared the national rising: Their names include those
of Pistonis, Koutiadis, Father Kyrillos, Emmanouil Kisthinios and
Konstantinos Kouris-of whom it is said that he took part in the sea-battle
of Samos and in the fighting of Attalia. Among others who fought in the
War of Independence were Ioannis Diamantaras, Hatzi-Stathis Zimbillas,
Ioannis Moldovanos, K. Voyiannos and Kyriakos Kalaitzis. As soon as the
rebellion began, the islanders of Castellorizo sent their women and
children, for safety's sake, to the islands of Kasos, Karpathos and
Amorgos. Then they converted their merchant vessels into warships, with
which they undertook a daring mission that resulted in the sinking of two
Turkish vessels in the Bay of Attalia. The island's position enabled its
seamen to gather information about enemy movements and send it to the
Greek fleet. Bishop Germanos of Palaia Patra wrote in his Memoirs (1837)
of the Castellorizan share in the national uprising that the ships of the
island struck horror and terror into the hearts of the enemy and captured
many Turkish merchant vessels.
In May 1822, Siyukur Pasha applied to Rhodes for the cannon from Castellorizo castle, which the islanders of Symi were to fetch for him. And on 14 August of 1827 Captain Adrianos Sotiriou of Spetses, patrolling off in his ship Aspasia, sent to Hydra a letter in which he told of a meeting on the island with Captain Nikolaos Santorinaios, who had sailed from Alexandria and was able to give him much valuable information about the movements of the Egyptian fleet. In 1821, according to an official report of Ioannis Capodistrias, first governor of free Greece, the population of Castellorizo was 2,500.
