High on a near-vertical cliff in the center of Chios, visible from miles away as a gray mass of stone dissolving into the rock itself, Anavatos is one of the most haunting places in all of the Greek islands. The village was built in the Byzantine era as the ultimate refuge — a military settlement so impossibly positioned that attackers could never reach it. For centuries it worked.
Then came 1822. In one of the darkest episodes of the Greek War of Independence, Ottoman forces carried out the Chios Massacre — a systematic slaughter and enslavement of the island's population that shocked all of Europe and inspired Delacroix's famous painting. When Ottoman troops reached Anavatos, the villagers chose to throw themselves from the cliff rather than surrender. The village was effectively abandoned from that day forward.
Today Anavatos is almost completely deserted — only a handful of elderly residents remain. Walking through its empty stone streets, with their collapsed roofs and darkened doorways, is a profoundly moving experience. The views from the clifftop are extraordinary, stretching across the mastic villages and olive groves of central Chios all the way to the Aegean.
The village is sometimes called the "Mystras of the Aegean" — a reference to the famous abandoned Byzantine city in the Peloponnese. Both deserve the comparison. Bring water, wear good shoes, and give yourself two hours to explore slowly.