Kastellorizo is a difficult place to summarise. Its full name in Greek is Megisti — "the largest" — which is a quiet joke, because at nine square kilometres it is the smallest of the Greek islands worth its own name. Its other, more popular name, Kastellorizo, comes from the Italian Castel Rosso, the Red Castle, a translation of the older Castello Rosso which itself referred to the reddish-stone fortress on the cliff above the harbour.
Names are a way of reading a place. This island has been named in five languages, ruled by perhaps a dozen powers, and emptied at least twice. What follows is the compressed version. We tell it slower when you walk the town with us.
Before Greece — the Lycian period.
The earliest visible thing on Kastellorizo is not Greek. On the path that climbs out of the harbour towards the church of Saint George of the Mountain, cut into the cliff face, is a rectangular doorway with a triangular pediment carved above it. It is a Lycian rock-tomb, dating from around the 4th century BCE.
The Lycians were the people of what is now southwestern Turkey. They had their own language, their own script, their own gods. They buried their dead in elaborate facade-tombs cut into living rock — the most famous examples are at Myra and Patara, on the mainland a few miles east of here. That a single Lycian tomb survives on Kastellorizo is the clearest possible proof of how thin the line between this island and Asia Minor has always been.
Hellenes, Romans, Byzantines.
From the 4th century BCE onwards, the island was Greek-speaking — a small Doric city allied to Rhodes. Under Rome, then Byzantium, it was a quiet outpost: a fishing harbour, a watering station for ships rounding the Anatolian coast on the way between Egypt and Constantinople. There was a small acropolis at Paleokastro, on the hill above town. Some of its walls still stand.
The first thing recorded as Kastellorizo's economy is sponge-fishing. The deep, clear waters around the island produced excellent natural sea sponges, which were dived for, dried, and traded. That trade lasted, in one form or another, for nearly two thousand years.
The Knights, the Ottomans.
In 1306, the Knights Hospitaller — the order that ruled Rhodes and most of the Dodecanese — took the island and built the Red Castle that gave it its modern name. The castle is a small thing by crusading standards, a square stone keep on the cliff above the harbour, but it dominated the small town below for centuries.
The Ottomans took the island in 1522, alongside Rhodes, and held it for nearly four hundred years. The local Greek population stayed, paid the head tax, kept their churches, and — this is the unusual part — kept getting richer. By the 19th century, Kastellorizo had become an extraordinary maritime town. Its sea captains owned ships across the eastern Mediterranean. The harbour was lined with mansions. The population reached over 14,000 people at its peak in the late 19th century — more than ten times what it is today.
"The painted houses you see along the harbour are what is left of a town that was once one of the busiest small ports in the Aegean."
The Italian period — and the painted houses.
In 1912, Italy took the Dodecanese from a collapsing Ottoman Empire. Kastellorizo was last to fall, in 1921, but it became Italian for the next twenty years. Italy invested heavily in island infrastructure — schools, the small hospital, harbour works — and brought with it the architectural language of the period: the elegant proportions, the stuccoed facades, and the bright Mediterranean colours that Italian-period buildings still carry across the Dodecanese.
The painted houses you see along the harbour today are partly Italian-era, partly older Greek-merchant townhouses repainted to the same palette. The mix is what gives the harbour its picture-postcard look — the same look you'll see on every postcard of the island, including ours.
The war that emptied the island.
And then, in the Second World War, Kastellorizo was almost destroyed. After Italy's surrender in 1943, the island fell briefly under British control. It was bombed by the Germans, then by the British (a fuel depot accident), then by the Germans again. By 1944, with no food and no functioning harbour, the entire population was evacuated to British-held Egypt — to refugee camps near Gaza and Nuseirat — and then to Cyprus.
When the war ended in 1945, the island was returned to Greece (formally in 1947, with the rest of the Dodecanese). The evacuated families came back. They found their houses ruined, looted, or burned. Most did not stay. Many emigrated to Australia — Perth in particular has the largest Kastellorizian diaspora community in the world, larger by far than the population that remains on the island. Today, Kastellorizo has a year-round population of around 250 people. In summer, with returning families, it triples.
What you see, when you look.
Walking the town with us, you see all of it at once. The Lycian tomb. The Hellenistic walls at Paleokastro. The Knights' castle. The Ottoman-era mansions of the sea captains. The Italian-period painted facades. The empty plots between houses, where buildings stood until 1944. The new generation of houses being slowly rebuilt.
It is a small island. It is not a quiet island, in the sense of "having little history". The opposite — it is so layered that the layers are hard to separate. We walk it slowly. We point.
And then we put you on a boat, and the same coastline, the same red cliffs, are the ones that gave the island its Italian name eight hundred years ago.
