Overview

Grand and solitary, rich in architecture and flora, Chios is more than any island in the Aegean a world to itself. The refined mosaics of the great 11th century church of Nea Moni are amongst the most important in Greece. Unique to the south of Chios are the house-fronts decorated in grey and white designs in sgraffito technique, which constitute such an attractive aspect of the Mastic Villages. (The harvesting of mastic gum has never been successfully replicated anywhere else in the Mediterranean). In the Kampos area to the south of the city are beautiful stone villas, farmsteads and orchards built by the Genoese settlers in the 18th century. Chios has an open, rugged and dramatic coast, with some of the wildest highlands of the Aegean in its interior. Oinousses still feels like forgotten frontier. Its peacefulness, the wide views into Turkey and to Chios and the dense and unusually varied vegetation of it garrigue are its greatest attractions. Psara is an island where visitors are not often seen. It has two interesting historic sites: the Mycenaean settlement at Archontiki and the fine Monastery of the Dormition.

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9781907859182

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Reviews of McGilchrist's Greek Islands: Delightful, well-observed, literary accompaniments to the Greek islands, by a British scholar.A The Economist,Books of the Year 2010 So evocative and informative, one hardly needs to go... Lovely...A Bettany Hughes, Sunday Herald - Books of the Year2010 A remarkable achievement - a complete, island by island, 3,000 page survey of all the historical monuments in the Aegean...A Barnaby Rogerson, Country Life Wonderful... superbly structured; immense learning elegantly, unobtrusively offered; and outstandingly well writtenA Prof. Jon Stallworthy, Wolfson College, Oxford

Author Information

Nigel McGilchrist lectures widely in art and archaeology at museums and institutions both in Europe and in the United States. He was Director of the Anglo-Italian Institute in Rome for six years, taught at the University of Rome, for the University of Massachusetts and was for seven years Dean of the joint Faculty of European Studies for a consortium of American Universities and Colleges. In recent years he has been lecturing at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. Over the last six years he has walked every path and village of the sixty inhabited Greek Aegean islands in order to prepare the twenty volumes of McGilchrist's Greek Islands. He lives near Orvieto in Italy where he produces olive oil and red wine.

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