Every ruler renamed it, and each name records what that ruler noticed. Two of them are ancient and mean opposite-sounding things which turn out to be the same thing. One of them is a Greek sentence that an empire mistook for a noun.

Τῆνος — and nobody knows what it means

The island is Tenos from the earliest surviving mention and never wavers. Herodotus calls it that, and so do its own coins: ΤΗ, ΤΗΝΙ, and in full ΤΗΝΙΩΝ — of the Tenians — struck from the fourth century BC to the first century AD.

What the word means is unknown. No Greek or Indo-European derivation commands assent, and the probability is that it is a pre-Greek name, from whoever was here before anyone who left a written language. Most Cycladic island names are in that position, and honest scholarship leaves them there.

Two derivations circulate and both should be treated with care. One makes it Phoenician, from a root meaning snake — but that was proposed by Samuel Bochart in 1646, a Hebraist who derived half the Mediterranean from Phoenician, and it was invented in order to explain the island’s other name. It is now quoted as evidence for that name, which is circular. The other invents a founder called Tenos, or in one version a princess banished by her father to a serpent-infested island, who burned the snakes out and gave the place her name. That is the standard Greek habit of manufacturing an ancestor out of a place-name, backwards.

Ὑδροῦσσα — the watery one

The best-attested of the alternative names, and the only one with a named authority behind it. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, says that Aristotle called the island Hydrusa, and gives the reason: propter aquarum abundantiam, on account of the abundance of its waters. Aristotle’s own text is lost, so Pliny is the only witness — but a named fourth-century-BC authority with a stated reason is as good as this kind of evidence gets.

Ὀφιοῦσσα — the snake island

Real, but thinner than the stories suggest, and worth setting out exactly.

In the same sentence of the same book, Pliny adds four words: aliqui Ophiusam — “some call it Ophioussa,” snake island, from ὄφις. He names no authority. He does not say the island had snakes. He offers no etymology. Every later account of Tinos swarming with serpents is an inference laid on top of those four words.

It also needs saying that Ophioussa was a floating label. Pliny himself applies it to Rhodes and to a town on the Dniester; it is used of Formentera, which the Romans also called Colubraria, and of the Portuguese coast. It was the Greek for Snake Island in the way English has a dozen Snake Islands. Being called Ophioussa tells you what somebody thought about a place, not which place it was.

Two things should be cleared away. There is no cult title Poseidon Ophiouchos; Ὀφιοῦχος, the Serpent-Bearer, belongs to Asklepios and to the constellation. And there is no stork on the coinage — which is a pity, because the coinage is otherwise emphatically Poseidon’s: the trident, the dolphin, Poseidon standing and seated, Amphitrite beside him, and before all of them a bunch of grapes on a T-shaped stalk.

The geology explains both. Tinos is built of impermeable schist over granite, which is a machine for making springs — the reason it has water where Mykonos and Delos have none. Add several hundred kilometres of rubble-cored, sun-warmed, rodent-filled dry-stone terrace wall, and the island becomes about as good a snake habitat as the Aegean offers. That last step is reasoning rather than a citation, but it is hard to avoid.

And yet the island itself does not remember any of it. There is no Tinian place-name in φιδ- or ὀφι-, no chapel of the snake, no custom. Ophioussa is a bookish name that came back to Tinos through Pliny and the travellers. It is not a name the island kept.

If that is what happened, then the reputation was transferred from a lost town in Thessaly to an island in the Cyclades by someone reading too quickly, and it has stuck for two thousand years.

But notice which half of the story would have travelled. The snakes on Tinos are real — eight species of them, more than any neighbour, and a viper. What is imported is not the serpents. It is the ending.

And the ending is the one part we can be certain is false. Nobody drove the snakes out of this island. They are still here.

And the ending keeps being made

Above Kampos, in the courtyard of the museum that Costas Tsoclis opened here in 2011 — an Athenian painter, born in 1930, with no Tinian blood, who came to this island and stayed and gave it a museum — a serpent lies across the paving. A scaled metal body in a long double curve, the tail in one corner and the head at the far wall. A lance runs the length of the terrace and into its back. At the top of the lance, mounted on the wall, is the rider: a rearing horse cut in relief, and of the saint himself only an arm, a hand and a halo.

Άη Γιώργης. Not the church’s Ἅγιος Γεώργιος but the vernacular — St George as a villager says him. That is the artist’s own title. The rest, from the museum in writing: 1990; a sculptural installation eighteen metres long; painting, aluminium and screens. A

It is monumental in the plain sense of the word: it does not fit indoors, and it is not meant to. The dragon is the size of the courtyard and the saint is the size of a hand.

Which is Poseidon and the storks in Christian dress. And the princess who burned the snakes out. And Pliny’s four words. The same story, made for the fourth time, on the same island, by a man who was not born here.

The oldest alternative name this island has means snake island. The largest thing an artist has made on it in living memory is a snake being killed. In between lie two thousand years of people insisting the job was finished — and eight species still living in the walls.

Tine — the name in the title of this book

Through the Venetian centuries and in every traveller who came, the island is Tine. It is Tine in Buondelmonti’s island-book of 1420, in dalli Sonetti’s of 1485, in Boschini’s Venetian atlas of 1658, on Coronelli’s engravings, and in Wheler, who wrote in 1682 that “Tine was anciently called Tinos.” Tino, the form modern Italian uses, is a later regularisation.

How Τῆνος became Tine has not, as far as I can find, been studied. The obvious mechanism does not fit: several Aegean islands acquired their western names by swallowing a Greek preposition — Astypalaia became Stampalia, Kos became Stanchio, Naxos became Nicsia — and Tine shows no sign of it. Simple Italianisation is the likeliest answer, and it is safer to say “the Venetian form” than to assert a derivation nobody has demonstrated.

The people are Τήνιοι, Tenians, in antiquity — the word on the coins — and Τηνιακοί, Tinians, today.

The Cyclades are dry. Tinos is not, and that single accident of geology explains the terraces, the cattle, the cheeses, the artichokes, the mills, the dovecotes, the population it once carried and the food it became known for.

The oldest name recorded for the island is Ὑδροῦσσα, Hydroussa — the watery one. It is not a poetic flourish. Tinos rises to 750 metres at Tsiknias, catches what the surrounding sea gives up, and holds it in springs and streams where its neighbours hold nothing. Compare Folegandros or Anafi: austere islands, austere food, and no amount of history would have changed either.

What the islanders did with the water is the more interesting half. The mountain slopes were cut into terraces from top to bottom — hundreds of kilometres of dry-stone retaining wall, built and rebuilt over centuries, mostly under Venetian rule and extended after it. The terraces are usually described as soil retention. They are also, and more importantly, a hydraulic system: each wall slows the run-off, holds the rain in the ground long enough to recharge the water table, and so feeds both the crops above and the watermills in the valleys below. Wind ground the grain on the ridges; water ground it in the valleys; both were ultimately powered by dry-stone walling.

The honest answer to “how many dovecotes” is that one person has counted and everyone else has estimated.

What is underneath, and the one place you can stand on it

Tinos is not volcanic, and it is not on the South Aegean volcanic arc. Santorini and Milos are; this island is not. A The claim turns up constantly in the Greek press — a mainstream travel site had the Volax boulders thrown out of a volcano twenty million years ago as recently as 2022 — so this is not a straw man.

What lies under Tinos is an exhumed metamorphic core complex: marble and schist that were sediments dragged sixty or eighty kilometres down a subduction zone and brought back up again. Into the eastern part of it a body of monzogranite to granodiorite was intruded, molten, and cooled slowly in the dark in the Miocene, somewhere in a window of roughly fourteen to eighteen million years ago. A a range, not a date, because the published ages are a range. Its coarse interlocking crystals are the proof of the slow cooling: rock erupted at the surface chills fine-grained, and this did not.

The boulder field at Volax is that granite, and the process that made it is the opposite of what it looks like. Granite cracks as it cools, into a three-dimensional grid of joints. Water works down the joints and rots the rock inward from every face it can reach. A corner is attacked from three sides and an edge from two, so the blocks round themselves from the inside out, leaving an unweathered core inside a shell of crumbling grit. Then the rain carries the soft material away and the rounded cores are left standing on the surface.

One thing should be added, because it is nearly true rather than true. No study devoted to the Volax boulder field has been found — no monograph, no paper whose subject it is. A doctoral thesis of 2008 mapped Tinos’s granite weathering forms, its tors and its corestones, without, so far as can be established, naming the place where they are most spectacular. B the thesis has not been read in full.

But the landform is not unrecorded. A geoheritage survey of the island published in 2025 names Volax directly, sets out exactly the process described above — “chemical weathering along joint systems and fractures penetrates the granite, rounding off angular edges and progressively isolating core stones that remain exposed as tors following the removal of the surrounding weathered mantle” — and formally designates two geosites here: the tors of the Volax area, and the corestones of the Falatados–Volax–Livada stretch. A A geomorphological survey of 2001 had already put “the Steni–Volax area” and spheroidal weathering in the same sentence. B

So the rock has a literature, and the landform has a paragraph inside it. What it does not have is a book of its own. For the most photographed hundred hectares on this island, that is still a gap.

And the other one-craft village

Tinos has exactly two entries in the Greek National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. One is the marble carving of the Exo Meri, which has chapter v to itself. The other is basket weaving at Volax, inscribed in 2019. A

Volax had thirty-six inhabitants at the 2021 census, against fifty-one in 2011 — a fall of nearly a third in ten years, on an island that grew over the same decade.

The craft established itself there in the second half of the eighteenth century because the land was poor; demand grew after 1823 with the pilgrim traffic, fell away after the 1920s, and collapsed after 1940 with the emigration. The materials are reed, willow rods and lygariá, each cut in its season — reed in January, willow in July and August, lygariá from September to March — and the rods are cut at the full moon, so that they will not rot. That last is not folklore collected by a journalist; it is in the state’s own dossier. A

The men wove; the women prepared the materials. They worked in the κατώι, the ground floor of the house. They made the καλάθι, the πανέρι, the κοφίνι, and the χαλικολόγος, a big stone-carrying basket made of lygariá alone. And they made them to order and sold them for money or in kind, many of them to the neighbouring islands.

Then the count, which is chapter xxiv’s whole argument reduced to one craft in one village: thirteen basket weavers in the 1980s; nine in the early 2000s; three in December 2018. A

One more thing, because it is hard to better as a fact about a small place: this village of thirty-six people built itself an open-air theatre — rows of marble seats for a few hundred, put up by the village association in the 1990s — and still maintains it out of donations. C the village’s own account of it was published on a website that was rebuilt in February 2026, taking the detail with it.

Water made this island fertile. The wind made it possible to keep what the water grew. Nearly everything in the rest of this chapter — the cured pork, the pierced marble, the eighty windmills, the threshing floors, the cheese in its gourd — is a way of using it.

Two names, and both of them tell you something

The Greeks called these winds the ἐτησίαι, etesiai — from ἔτος, year. They named them for their reliability. A wind that arrives every summer without fail and can be planned around is not weather; it is a season, and they gave it the word for the year itself.

The name in use today is Meltemi, and its likeliest origin is the Italian mal tempo — bad weather.

What it is, in plain terms: a strong, dry, cool northerly, blowing from about mid-May to mid-September, driven by the pressure difference between a high over the Balkans and the deep summer depression over south-west Asia. It reaches force 7 or 8 on the Beaufort scale. And — the detail that governs the day here — it is strongest in the afternoon and often dies away at night.

What the old people say it does

The knowledge passed down on this island is specific, and it is about dryness rather than about coolness:

Everything in this part of the book is downstream of it

Read the following chapters again with the wind in mind and they stop being separate subjects.

The signature food of Tinos is made of wind. Λούζα is pork loin salted, steeped in wine, and then hung to dry in moving air. Without a reliable dry northerly it does not cure; it rots. The same is true of the sausages, of the figs, and of the myzina that is smoked and then air-dried.

The cheese toolkit is a dry toolkit. This island preserves cheese in a gourd sealed with flour paste, under a marble slab, in a woven basket — never in oil, as the oil islands do. Dry methods work where the air is dry.

The fanlights are ventilation. The pierced marble above the doors exists to move air through a shut house — and a house is shut, in summer, precisely because the Meltemi is blowing.

The windmills are the wind made into flour. Around eighty of them, three storeys high, eight arms apiece. They exist because the wind here is dependable enough to build a stone tower on.

And the threshing floors could not work without it. Winnowing is throwing grain into the air and letting the wind take the chaff away. The circular stone ἁλώνια of this island are sited to catch it. No wind, no bread.

Two different days on the same island

Here is the observation that gives the whole thing away, and you can watch it happen every August.

The islander’s day is built around the middle of it. Out at first light, work through the cool of the morning, indoors for the worst of the heat and the worst of the wind, then out again and work until the light goes. It is an old shape and it is a rational one — because the Meltemi peaks in the afternoon, exactly when the sun does.

The visitor’s day is the inverse. The visitor shelters from the wind and seeks the midday sun — lying still, in the open, at the one hour the people who live here have spent three thousand years going indoors.

A man who spent his life cutting marble on this island did not describe the wind as a nuisance to be endured. He described it as the thing that would not let him settle — and gave it the credit for what he made.

Tinos ran a substantial silk economy for at least a century and a half, out-produced the neighbour now remembered for it, and wrote silk into its own act of submission to Venice. Then the trade collapsed and the mulberries went into the fires. It survives mostly as a rumour, which is why it is worth setting down.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a botanist sent to the Levant by Louis XIV. He stood on this island around 1700 and wrote that sentence, and then — being the kind of man he was — he wrote the same sentence for every other island he visited, with the numbers. That accident of method produced the only genuinely comparable set of figures for Aegean silk that exists, and on it Tinos comes second only to Chios, ahead of Andros.

An independent survey of Cycladic industry describes Andros and Tinos as having almost monopolised silk in the islands, both of them “covered with mulberry trees”, each exporting some 6,000 okades — about 7,690 kg, which agrees with Tournefort to within two per cent. That agreement is suspicious rather than reassuring: it probably means the later figure is derived from the earlier one. Treat them as one measurement, not two.

Silk was in the contract

This is the fact that reframes the whole subject, and it comes from the Venetian archives.

When the Tinians submitted to Venice in 1390, the agreement stipulated that the production and export of silk must remain free. The lordship’s revenues were confined to lesser levies on less interesting products. For three centuries Venice, whose administration on Tinos ran at a loss, kept returning to the obvious solution — tax the island’s single most lucrative activity — and kept being told it could not. The proposal met, in Slot’s words, vehement opposition. All the old documents on Tinian privileges were pulled and studied. And then:

The Republic ran out of time before it ran out of arguments.

Lacroix, writing in 1853, still describes the hillsides of Tinos as clothed with fig and mulberry trees which never grow tall — and never growing tall is precisely what happens to a tree pruned for its leaves. But Lacroix is a compiler who can be caught copying Tournefort elsewhere, so the date he implies should not be leaned on. The census is firmer: in 1860 the kingdom still counted 142,100 mulberry trees standing in the Cyclades; nobody counted Tinos’s separately. A What is safe is this: mulberries were a visible feature of this island within living memory of people alive in 1900, and by the time anyone thought to write the island’s history they were gone.

The count is the agricultural census of 1860, printed in Α. Μανσόλας, Πολιτειογραφικαὶ πληροφορίαι περὶ Ἑλλάδος (Athens, 1867) — read in his own pages for this edition. His table stops at the prefecture.

And silk did one more thing, which outlasted it

The mulberries went, and the reeling went with them. What did not go was the skill, or the people who had it.

The women of this island, working the silk that was in the house anyway, had specialised in knitting silk goods — above all stockings, which were known in Europe for how long they lasted. That is a domestic occupation that is also a trade, and it gave them something almost no other women in the Aegean had: work experience outside the house and the field. A

Zallony, the island’s own doctor, watched the stockings being made. Every winter, from the first of November until Palm Sunday, the villages kept the βεγγέρα: house by house in turn, from six in the evening until midnight or one — the young women knitting silk stockings, the married women spinning cotton, the older women the wool and the silk, the men telling their adventures in turn or reading a story aloud, the young women singing, and the host baking τυρόπιτες of fresh cheese, egg yolks and honey. C The stocking that lasted in Europe was made in that room.

He also wrote down what the silk cost, because as a doctor he kept the bill. The leaves were the women’s work, and the mulberries were tall: “some die on the spot; others die suffering from their wounds; few escape death, after lying bedridden for many months. These accidents are frequent.” The worms themselves — forty and fifty thousand to a house — were kept in the bedrooms, the doors sealed against the cold air, until the silk was gathered. C

From the second half of the eighteenth century they began to take it abroad — to Smyrna, to Constantinople, to Thessaloniki, many of them travelling alone. What they were hired for in the end was domestic service rather than silk, and the reputation they earned there is set out in chapter xxv. But the historian who traces it puts the causation in one sentence, and it is the reason this chapter is not only about a dead trade:

So the last thing the mulberries produced was not thread. It was a hundred and fifty years of Tinian women earning wages in other people’s cities — and, in a great many cases, coming home with them.

Tinian hands cut the marble of neoclassical Athens and then worked the Danube, the Bosphorus and the Nile. The mechanism was family apprenticeship and mobile teams — a portable skill, transmitted by blood.

Marble on Tinos is not one story but three laid end to end. There is an ancient and Byzantine substratum, thin but continuous, with finds from the fifth to the eighth centuries and evidence increasing from the tenth. There is a Venetian and post-Venetian craft, whose oldest surviving products are coats of arms of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and whose first documented organised team is that of Ioannis Frangiskos Apergis of Pyrgos in 1662–64. And there is the explosion after 1830, when a new Greek state needed a capital built out of marble and this island happened to contain the people who knew how.

The Venetian contribution to that middle phase is stated plainly by the Ministry of Culture, and it is more interesting than “Venice liked art”. Four things came together: relative stability; patrons building mansions and churches; technical contact with Venice and with Venetian Crete; and — the point that actually matters — a Catholic Church comfortable with figural sculpture where the Orthodox Church was not. An island whose western half was Latin could carve human figures on its churches. Its neighbours could not.

Giannoulis Chalepas was born at Pyrgos on 14 August 1851, the son of a marble craftsman, studied in Athens and then in Munich on a scholarship from the Evangelistria foundation of his own island, and died in 1938. His house is a declared monument and was restored between 2023 and 2025. The School of Fine Arts and Marble Craftsmanship at Pyrgos was founded in 1955 and still runs, with around thirty-five students from across the country — far too late to have produced any historic fanlight, and frequently confused with the tradition it was founded to rescue.

The list is the history, and the order of it is the argument

The Greek state’s inventory of the craft names the carved types that came off these benches, and the order of the list is the whole story in one line: tomb slabs, then neoclassical funerary monuments, then war memorials. A Not three trades. One trade, following its market. A village cutting grave markers for its neighbours in the seventeenth century was, by the end of the nineteenth, cutting monuments for cities it had never seen, and by the twentieth, cutting the memorials Greece put up to the men it lost — with the same tools, the same apprenticeship, and in several cases the same families.

The man from Ysternia who carved another island’s unburied dead

Ermoupoli, on Syros, resolved to raise a monument to the unburied dead of the Greek Revolution. The commission was decided on 26 May 1880 and went to Georgios Vitalis, born at Ysternia on this island in 1838: a stele of a metre and a half by two and a half, a Thasian marble sarcophagus, a recumbent lion, and a kneeling woman cutting the epigram into the stone. It was inaugurated in 1887 and it is signed Γ. ΒΙΤΑΛΗΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΙ 1880. B

Vitalis had studied at Munich on a scholarship from the Holy Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos — granted by royal decree of 26 November 1864, three years, extended to 1872, in the workshop of Max von Widnmann, a silver medal in 1868. A The same foundation pays the running costs of the marble school at Pyrgos today.

The money a man from Ysternia used to learn to carve a monument to the nameless dead of one island came from the offerings of pilgrims on another — and it is still paying for the same thing a hundred and forty years later.

The most famous piece of modern Greek sculpture is a grave marker

The Κοιμωμένη, the Sleeping Maiden, was carved in marble by Yannoulis Chalepas of Pyrgos as the funerary monument of Sofia Afentaki, in the First Cemetery of Athens. She had died of tuberculosis; her uncle commissioned it. A newspaper notice of September 1879 already called it the most significant work in that cemetery. A

It is worth saying flatly, because the reproductions have turned it into a piece of gallery sculpture: it is a grave marker. It was made to be looked at by one family, in the open air, over a body.

The marble is still on the grave. A permanent transfer to the National Glyptotheque was announced in March 2017, with the family’s consent, but no source records that it was carried out; the Glyptotheque shows a plaster cast made in 1980. B The date of the carving is given as 1877, 1878, 1879 and 1880 by different institutions — Chalepas himself said 1880 — and this book does not choose between them.

Where the archive is, and where it isn’t

The Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation, which runs the Museum of Marble Crafts at Pyrgos, put it in its own words when it took the Brotherhood of Tinians in Athens round the First Cemetery: from the second half of the nineteenth century, families of Tinian sculptors worked on the distinctive types of marble monument there — and it names them. Μαλακατέ, Φυτάλη, Δούκα, Στεργίου, Περάκη, and alongside them Φιλιππότη and Χαλεπά, whose work still stands over family graves. B

Seven Tinian names in a single sentence.

Now set beside it the official visitor guide to Athens, describing the same cemetery: the original craftsmen were from Tinos, and the anonymous creators of the elaborate crosses and stone epitaphs were never recorded. B

Both statements are true. The names exist and were never written on the stones.

And the last thing to say about this trade is that it has not stopped

This chapter has been written in the past tense. The circuit abroad closed; the scholarships ended; the villages emptied. That is the honest shape of it, and it is why the chart of what this island has sold, in chapter xxv, gives the carvers’ emigration abroad the shortest bar on its page.

But the bench is still there.

OpenA question this book cannot answer and the sculptor can

Vidalis — Βιδάλης — is a variant of Βιτάλης, and Georgios Vitalis of Ysternia is the man who carved Ermoupoli’s monument to the unburied dead of the Revolution on an Evangelistria scholarship, earlier in this chapter. It is also one of the six surnames chapter xxvii uses to show what a Tinian telephone directory looks like.

Not to be confused with Maria Vidali, the architect who counted this island’s chapels in chapter xxi. Different name, different person, and the resemblance is a coincidence of a small island’s onomastics.

Whether there is a family line between the two is not something a search can settle, and this book does not assert one. It is a question for the man holding the chisel. Asked, he said it would be better to talk than to write — so the question stands, and stands honestly.

He answered two things that were not asked, and both belong in this book.

His name is Lorentzos Vidalis — Λορέντζος Βιδάλης, son of Lorentzos and Marietta, and registered as Λαυρέντιος, which is the same name wearing its formal clothes. He lives at Ktikados: the village of the Table of Love — the Easter meal nobody may sit down to until they have made up their quarrel (chapter xxiii).

And the village has been putting the trade over its church door for two centuries. At the church of the Ypapanti, at the far end of Ktikados, Saint George has been killing the dragon in marble since at least 1823 — mid-revolution — and he does it four times on one front.

And his workshop is at Kionia.

Κιόνια means the columns. Chapter xi is about what stood there: the sanctuary of Poseidon and Amphitrite, on the shore three kilometres west of Chora, in use for five and a half centuries, and named ever since for the marble that was left lying on the ground.

So the lion in this chapter was cut, in marble, by a Tinian, on the beach the island named after a marble building.

Nothing descends from the one to the other, and it would be dishonest to imply that it does. The marble villages are in the Exo Meri, on the far side of the island, and no line of workshops runs from a Hellenistic temple to a yard in 2026. It is an accident of where the flat land near the sea is.

But it is the accident this island keeps having. The same few things — the stone, the water, a position on a sea lane — get picked up and used again by people who owe each other nothing and mostly do not know the last lot were there. That is what the four parts of this book are trying to describe, and it is easier to see in one man’s address than in any argument I could make about it.

Two of this island’s puzzles turn out to answer each other. The carved marble panels above the doors are not decoration that happens to be perforated. They are perforated because the room behind them was full of silkworms, and when the silk went, the carving went with it.

First, the word

The general term is ὑπέρθυρο, ypérthyro — an overdoor, any carved marble set above an opening. The famous Tinian object is a species within it: the φεγγίτης, fengítis, a pierced slab filling the tympanum under the relieving arch, which lets light and air through a shut house. The Ministry of Culture’s own definition is exact: “fanlights — a special category of perforated lintels covering the relieving arches above doors and windows.” In the north of the island they are called καμάρια. French scholarship calls them lucarnes de marbre.

Getting this right matters, because conflating the two is precisely what most writing about Tinos does.

Second, a correction

They are not unique to Tinos. Alekos Florakis, who has written the monograph on them, says plainly that they are “très répandues dans l’île, mais aussi plus généralement dans les Cyclades” — widespread on the island, but more generally across the Cyclades. The National Gallery catalogues its examples as “Island Fanlight”, provenance “Cycladic Islands”.

What is Tinian is not the object but the industry: the concentration, the quality, and above all the survival. The defensible sentence is that marble fanlights are a Cycladic form which Tinos produced in greater number and higher quality than anywhere else, and on which it is on Tinos that they survive in situ in quantity.

Third, why they are pierced

Florakis gives the reason and it has nothing to do with any empire: “Les lucarnes garantissaient une luminosité et une aération suffisante lorsque les portes et les fenêtres étaient fermées.” The fanlights guaranteed enough light and ventilation when the doors and windows were shut.

Why would a house be shut? Because silkworms were reared indoors, in a dedicated room, on trays of mulberry leaf, and they needed air and light without draught. The perforations also created storage at lintel level for bread and provisions.

And the proof is in the collapse. Production of fanlights fell away from the last quarter of the nineteenth century — and Florakis attributes it to the abandonment of sericulture, alongside new architectural fashions and the decline of the regional centres. A purely stylistic explanation cannot account for that correlation. A functional one can.

Fourth, and least expected: the finest ones are not Venetian

Florakis’s four-phase typology runs: plain schist or thick marble slabs, originating in the seventeenth century; house fanlights of the first half of the eighteenth, in thick compact marble, roughly cut; those of the second half of the eighteenth in the grey φιλιαρικό marble; and then the baroque fanlights, appearing at Pyrgos in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.

Where did the baroque come from? Not Venice — Venice had left in 1715. Florakis’s answer is Constantinople: Tinian craftsmen migrated there for work after the conquest and brought back a rococo vocabulary in an Ottoman remodelling. “C’est ainsi que le baroque ottoman s’introduit à Tinos.”

So the showpiece fanlights — the ones people photograph — are strictly post-Venetian and Ottoman-inflected. The heraldry on this island is Venetian; the pierced form is functional and local; the flowers are Ottoman; and the industry that executed all of it is Tinian.

A Categories from the Museum of Marble Crafts and the Ministry of Culture inventory. The Benaki fanlight of 1806 is inscribed 1806 / ΑΠΡ 13 / ΠΕΡΟC — read by Florakis as Georgios Peros, representative of the village of Platia. Day, month, year and owner.

And it has now been photographed

Until this year, the one object that would settle this chapter had never been photographed. The text said so. It has now.

The church at Kato Kleisma is the Catholic parish church of the village, dedicated to the Metastasis of the Theotokos — the Assumption, in the Catholic Greek form — and its patronal feast is still kept on 15 August with the archbishop celebrating. C for the source type; the dedication and the rite are not in doubt

Its west front carries, in what looks like a single campaign: a doorway with carved jambs under an inscribed lintel; a twin marble window — a bifora — with vines, grapes and crosses cut into the frame; pierced fanlights in arched niches; an oculus filled with a pierced marble wheel; and a carved interlace panel in the gable. On the cornice immediately above the door, an eagle.

And the lintel is dated.

The text is laid out to be read across the medallion — ANNO DOMINI on the left, 1760 on the right — and it runs:

To God, the Best and Greatest. In the year of the Lord 1760. Iacobus Cicala, priest of this district, was the curate who had this church — already falling into ruin — restored and renewed, at the expense of the church itself and by the labours and means of all the brethren of the district.

Four things follow, and they belong to four different chapters.

It is in Latin, cut in 1760 — forty-five years after Venice left, in a village that had been under Ottoman sovereignty for a generation, with no Venetian rector to impress and no Latin-reading public to address. Nobody required this. The Catholic villages of this island were still putting Latin over their doors when nothing and nobody made them.

It is Roman in form: D·O·M, the Christogram in glory, the whole dedicatory grammar of the Latin west. There is no ambiguity about the rite.

It names a priest, Iacobus Cicala — an Italian surname in a Greek village, which is chapter xxvii’s argument standing in a wall. The Catholic bishop of Tinos and Mykonos from 1716 to 1738 was Nicolaus Cigala, whose tomb slab at Xinara bears a double-headed eagle. B No document links the two men, and the National Hellenic Research Foundation records the bishop as of the Santorini branch. The honest statement is that the same uncommon surname appears twice on this island within twenty-two years, in a bishop and in a village priest.

And it records a rebuilding paid for by the church and worked by the village — sumptibus ac omnium ruris confratrum laboribus et ope. Not a lord, not a bishop, not a foundation. The parish, and its own hands.

Florakis dates the transitional type of Tinian fanlight to the 1750s or 1760s, with the developed type in the second half of the eighteenth century. B A dated 1760 front therefore stands at the beginning of the tradition this chapter describes, not in its late flowering.

Several hundred kilometres of stone path cross Tinos. Where the paving is, the money was. And the paving describes two completely different islands lying on top of each other.

The Greek word usually used is καλντερίμι, kalderimi — from Turkish kaldırım, pavement. It is worth knowing that the popular derivation from καλὸς δρόμος, “good road”, is folk etymology and wrong. It is also worth knowing that on Tinos the word is slightly foreign: the local technique uses large flat slabs rather than cobbles, and the native word is στράτα — a πλακόστρωτη στράτα, a slab-paved way. The French chemin muletier describes the use rather than the surface.

A kalderimi is built for hooves, not wheels. The standard width — around two metres — is the width at which two fully laden mules can pass one another. Steep sections get stone steps; slopes get retaining walls; drops get parapets; streams get paved fords. Flat, low-traffic stretches were often left unpaved, because paving is expensive and was laid where it was needed. That is why the network is legible: paving is a record of capital investment, and it went where the traffic was.

How much of it there is

The spread is probably definitional rather than contradictory. The two figures with a stated method behind them are the 270 and the 120.

The waymarked network — twelve thematic routes and nine variants — was commissioned by the Municipality of Tinos in 2019 and completed in June 2020. Before that, Károlos Merlyn had surveyed the whole system by GPS in 2007 and published a map; before that again, the South Aegean Region marked twelve routes which then partly lapsed under vegetation.

Why it cannot be dated, and why that is the honest answer

The best local source says it outright: verification of the age of the paths is difficult “because the way of their construction remains the same and unaltered in the lapse of the centuries.” The technique does not date itself. What can be dated is thin: the Vari path, said to be the oldest, linking the ancient town near Kionia to the settlements of the interior; Exombourgo as the island’s centre from the tenth century BC, sited inland against piracy; and one section on the Falatados–Volax–Agapi–Kolymbithra route described as Byzantine, pre-1453 — and recorded, in the same sentence, as having been destroyed by residents.

The defensible description is that the network is a continuously re-surfaced inheritance: an ancient armature centred on Exombourgo, densified under Venice when the population was inland and the castle was the node, and re-paved piecemeal ever since.

The two networks

Read the twelve routes against what they touch and the island splits in half.

In the centre and east, a subsistence lattice. Short, many-branched, tying villages to terraces, threshing floors, watermills, springs, dovecotes, beehives, field huts and chapels — and converging on Exombourgo, which three of the twelve routes touch. Its geometry is centripetal and inland. It is the geometry of a household and a parish.

In the north-west, an export corridor. Quarries at Marlas, Mali and Koumelas; the workshop villages of Pyrgos and Ysternia; the harbours at Panormos, Ormos Ysternion and Kousinia. Its geometry is linear and sea-directed, and it is here that the paving becomes marble and monumental. It is the geometry of an international market — Mount Athos, Smyrna, Constantinople, Odessa, Alexandria.

For comparison: Andros has over 500 km of network, 240 km marked to European standards, run since 2009 by a dedicated research centre funded by private donation and subscription, inspected five times a year, and holding the European Ramblers’ Association’s “Leading Quality Trails” certification since 2015 — the only European island that does. Tinos has comparable raw extent, a municipal department, a contractor project and a volunteer call-out. The gap is not resource. It is custodianship.

Everyone repeats that Metaxas ordered the islands whitewashed against cholera in 1938, and that the colonels mandated blue and white to match the flag. Neither claim can be evidenced. What can be evidenced is stranger: the whiteness is a by-product of a rule that names lime, and it dates from 1988.

The chemistry is real, and it expires

Limestone or marble burnt in a kiln gives quicklime; slaked with water it becomes calcium hydroxide, the limewash; on the wall it slowly re-absorbs carbon dioxide and reverts to the stone it came from. That cycle explains everything.

Wet limewash holds a pH of 12.4 and is a genuine disinfectant — it inactivates E. coli within a day and some viruses within minutes. But outdoors it carbonates, and the pH falls to around 9 within roughly forty-four days, at which point it stops disinfecting altogether.

Which resolves the old argument about whether whitewashing was hygiene or habit. It was both, and it could only be hygiene because it was habit: a wall limewashed once and left is chemically inert. The practice worked because it was repeated every year, traditionally around Easter.

The other properties are real too, in descending order of certainty: it is vapour-open, so the wall breathes — which is why modern acrylic paint damages old masonry by sealing moisture in; it reflects heat; it consolidates masonry and seals hairline cracks. Insect deterrence is universally claimed and, as far as I can find, never studied. It should not be asserted.

And Tinos is not a white island

Anglophone travel writing flattens Tinos into Mykonos. The Tinian sources do not. The building materials here are local marble and schist, and the settlements were deliberately built of dark schist in dense masses so as to be invisible from the sea — the exact opposite design intention from whitewash. Marble was left bare: surrounds, lintels, fanlights, fountains, bell towers, and the patterned schist of the dovecotes.

The accurate description is a schist-and-marble island with a lime skin — white pointing rather than white houses, which is why the marble reads at all.

What the villages looked like before is genuinely unsettled. One position, from a serious architectural historian, is that while the Aegean was pirate-infested it was irrational to paint a house a visible colour, that houses were left stone-coloured, and that deliberate colour arrives with neoclassicism in the late nineteenth century — ochre, blue and pink façades — after which the whitewash erased it. The competing position is that nineteenth-century engravings and photographs already show plastered white buildings. Nobody has published paint stratigraphy, which is the only thing that would settle it.

Tinian food is celebrated for cured pork with Italian names, and the Venetian influence is real. But the deeper fact is one nobody says: this is not an olive island. What oil does elsewhere, lard did here — and once you see that, the whole calendar falls into place.

First, the awkward fact

Tozer, who walked these terraces, describes them in 1890 as running from top to bottom of the mountain slopes “mainly for the cultivation of the vine.” Not olives. In the same book, olives appear as village-fringe trees — houses “surrounded by olives, oranges, and fig-trees” — which is a dooryard pattern, not a grove economy. Wheler in 1682 lists “plenty of Vineyards, Figs and Olives”, in that order. Modern ethnography in Kampos records families producing wine, olive oil and vegetables for family use, on four or five scattered plots.

And Tinos appears in no Greek olive-oil designation of origin, and on no list of the oil-producing Cyclades — a list that names Naxos, Paros, Serifos, Sikinos and Milos.

Tinos had olives. It was not an oil island.

The killing — χοιροσφάγια

It happened in November and December: before the feasts, not on them, because its purpose was to stock the larder for them. Every household kept at least one pig a year. The work needed many hands and began before dawn.

In the days beforehand the women gathered herbs, dried them in the sun and rubbed them with salt; the men collected olive wood for the fire; and the houses, the courtyards and the roads were whitewashed. The invited guests were the priest, the schoolteacher, the doctor — and any foreigner who happened to be on the island. That guest list is worth pausing on. It makes the pig-killing the village’s annual act of self-definition, and not merely a butchery.

The animal weighed 150 to 200 kilos and was expected to feed the family through the year. From it came λούζα, the cured loin; λουκάνικα and σκορδάτα σαλσίτσια, sausages plain and garlicked; πηχτή, brawn; σύγλινα, meat cooked slowly in its own fat and sealed under it; and γλίνα, the rendered fat itself. Nothing was wasted: the bristle went to shoemakers for stitching. Afterwards there was bone soup, braised meat with potatoes, dolmades, liver, wine, and a violin and a lute.

Three loops that close

Set the year out as a circle and it does something a list cannot: it closes.

The vine. Grapes are harvested and pressed in September; the wine cures the louza in November; the marc left over from the pressing smokes the myzina. One plant, three jobs, in sequence.

The gourd. Harvested and dried in October; packed with the salted cheese; holds it through the winter; is empty again as the spring milk starts.

And the fat. The pig is fattened through the autumn, killed in November or December, and rendered. That fat is the cooking medium of the household until it runs out — which, on the Cretan evidence, is around Carnival. And Carnival is when Lent begins, and Lent forbids fat.

Stand on the ridge at Anogeia and turn through the compass. Due west is the island Rome used as its word for the end of the world, and modern Greece used for the same purpose. South is the capital of the Cyclades. South-east, past the flat one, is the sanctuary of the whole Aegean — which achieved its holiness by making it illegal to be born or to die there. Tinos had nothing to do with any of it, and that is the chapter.

Due west — the island Rome could not bring itself to use

There is a long grey island out to the west, low at one end and rising to a ridge at the other, and on a clear evening it sits on the water like a ship that has stopped. It is Gyaros — Γυάρος, and on the older charts Joura. It is 17.6 square kilometres and rises to 489 metres, which is higher than anything on Mykonos. About twenty kilometres of open water separate it from this coast; the nearest land to it is not Tinos or Syros but Andros, eight kilometres off. B

That it can be seen from here is a matter of geometry rather than of testimony. A summit of 489 metres carries a refracted horizon of about eighty-five kilometres, and an observer two hundred metres up on Tinos adds another fifty-five; against a separation of twenty to thirty-five kilometres the island is comfortably in view. A computed, not quoted. No published source anywhere states that Gyaros is visible from Tinos, which is itself worth knowing: nobody has ever thought the relation important enough to write down.

It belongs to Syros. It has never at any period belonged to Tinos.

Juvenal, at the turn of the second century, needed a single word for the worst thing that could happen to a Roman and reached for this island:

aude aliquid breuibus Gyaris et carcere dignum,
si uis esse aliquid. probitas laudatur et alget;

Dare something worth narrow Gyara and prison, if you want to be somebody. Honesty is praised — and freezes. A Virgil had already called it lofty, and lofty is right.

The telling evidence is not the poets, though. It is the paperwork.

In AD 22 the Senate voted to relegate Gaius Junius Silanus to Gyaros. Tiberius — the emperor of Capri and the treason trials, not a man with a reputation for softness — intervened to say that the island was harsh and without human cultivation, insulam Gyarum immitem et sine cultu hominum esse, and sent him to Kythnos instead. Two years later the Senate proposed Gyaros again, for Vibius Serenus. Tiberius refused a second time, observing that both islands wanted for water — egenam aquae utramque insulam referens — and that a man granted his life must be granted the means of living it. Serenus went to Amorgos. A Tacitus, Annals 3.69 and 4.30, verbatim

It was not quite empty. Strabo, the geographer, put in there in 29 BC and found a fishing village, and took aboard the man the villagers had elected to sail to Corinth and ask Augustus to reduce their tribute: they were being asked for a hundred and fifty drachmas, he says, and could barely raise a hundred. A It is the only recorded occasion on which anybody from Gyaros asked an emperor for anything.

And then modern Greece used it for exactly the same thing

Between 1947 and 1974 the Greek state ran a place of political exile on Gyaros, in three phases: July 1947 to October 1952; 1955 to 1961, with the prison ledgers running to 1963; and 1967 to November 1968, reopening in February 1974 until the junta fell. B Papaeti, Torture 23(2), 2013, peer-reviewed. Note that the junta phase was not continuous, which most accounts get wrong. Something in the order of twenty thousand people passed through in total. C

The prisoners built their own prison. Red brick, cement mixed with seawater because there was no other water, deliberately uninsulated: about eleven thousand square metres, and still the largest building in the Cyclades. B There is nothing in Ermoupoli or in Chora to touch it. It stands on an island with no water, and the men it was built to hold laid the bricks.

No death toll exists. There are three visible crosses in the cemetery, and the engineering study made for the memorial project counted about twenty graves and called the number surprisingly small against the size of the installations. What is said locally is that dying prisoners were shipped to Syros so that the deaths would not be recorded on Gyaros. C one source only, and given here as what is said rather than as what is known.

Yannis Ritsos passed through — arrested after the April 1967 coup, moved on to Leros by September. B The poet was here; the exile poems are from somewhere else.

What broke it open was a photograph. In July 1967 the German photographer Fred Ihrt flew over Gyaros in a light aircraft and photographed the camp from the air; Stern ran the pictures, Der Spiegel and Paris Match followed, and the story took first prize for photo stories at World Press Photo that year. A The International Committee of the Red Cross recorded the end of it in its own words: “the island of Yaros was evacuated completely in October 1968 and 400 sick or aged detainees were unconditionally released.” A

The cruelty and the sanctuary have the same cause

The camp closed with the junta. The navy then used the island as a firing range until about 2000, and unexploded ordnance still restricts landing. Which means that for the better part of seventy years — first because it was a prison, then because it was a target — nobody went ashore.

In 2013 the monk seals were found using the open beaches of Gyaros to rest, to give birth and to nurse their pups: behaviour the species had been thought to have abandoned centuries ago because of people. Gyaros and Cabo Blanco, on the Atlantic coast of the Sahara, are the only two surviving aggregations of Mediterranean monk seals anywhere that still hold the structure of a colony. A Karamanlidis et al., Mammal Review, 2016. The often-repeated claim that Gyaros holds the largest monk seal population in the Mediterranean is not what that paper says and is not printed here. The population is of the order of sixty to seventy animals. About a hundred and seventy pairs of Eleonora’s falcons nest on the cliffs.

The island was listed under Natura 2000 in 2011, became in 2019 the first marine protected area in the Cyclades, and a presidential decree signed on 16 April 2026 made the fishing ban within three nautical miles permanent while placing the prison ruins in a zone designated for restoration. A memorial went up in 2019 — Ρωγμή, “Crack”, by Antonis Myrodias: twenty-one steel prisms, one for each year the camp operated.

Its protection has been argued over ever since — listed whole as a monument in 2001, partly de-listed in 2011, a museum funded on paper and never built, wind parks proposed inside the reserve in 2024 — and one fact indicts every number in this section: the General State Archives hold the Gyaros prison archive, forty-two ledgers, 1945–1952 and 1955–1963, deposited in 2002 and never tallied. Every published total for this island is an estimate sitting next to an uncounted primary source.

South-east — and the oldest version of an argument people still have about Tinos

Turn ninety degrees and the view is different in kind. From the south-east coast, from Agios Sostis, Mykonos lies flat on the water in front of you — eight nautical miles across to the town, and less to the nearest beach. And behind it, out of sight, is Delos.

People who come here say a version of the same thing: that Tinos is the holy island and Mykonos is the other kind, and that the two of them face each other across a strait like an argument. It is a postcard when it is left there. It is something better when you check it, because the pairing is twenty-four centuries old and it was originally drawn between a different pair of islands.

Delos was the sanctuary of the whole Aegean. In 426 BC the Athenians purified it: every grave on the island was dug up and carried across to Rheneia, and from that day nobody was permitted to be born or to die on Delos. A Thucydides 3.104 Purity was achieved by legislation, and by exporting birth and death to the island next door. Mykonos, meanwhile, was where people lived: the ordinary, worldly, inhabited island beside the holy one.

And both of the modern reputations are young. Tinos’s rests on the finding of the icon in 1823. Mykonos’s rests on what happened there from the 1960s. Two neighbouring islands whose entire modern identities were made within a hundred and forty years of each other, on a channel where the sacred and the profane have been facing one another since Thucydides.

South — the capital, and a debt

Syros lies to the south: Ermoupoli, the largest town in the Cyclades and its administrative seat, a nineteenth-century commercial city built by refugees. Gyaros was supplied from there and buried its dead there.

And a thread of this book runs through the same town. The monument Ermoupoli raised to the unburied dead of the Revolution was carved by a man from Ysternia, on the money of a foundation in Chora — chapter v has him.

So the two things this chapter can see to the south are an exile colony and a monument to the nameless dead, and neither is a Tinian story except through the man who cut one of them.

Rome’s word for the end of the world; modern Greece’s; the last beach in the Mediterranean where a seal will give birth in the open; and the sanctuary that made birth and death illegal. All of it within thirty kilometres, in plain sight, on a clear evening — and none of it ours.

The island’s religious role did not begin in 1823 with an icon. It began with a sanctuary on the shore where pilgrims purified themselves before crossing to the most sacred island in the Aegean — and where the god was worshipped as a physician. The function never left. Only the name on the door changed.

Three kilometres west of Chora, at a place called Kionia — the columns — stood the sanctuary of Poseidon and Amphitrite. It was founded at the end of the fourth century BC and abandoned in the middle of the third century AD: some five and a half centuries of continuous use.

Two things about it are unusual. Of all the Cyclades, only Tinos gave Poseidon an entire sanctuary — everywhere else he is one god among others. And Amphitrite stood beside him on equal terms, named in the dedication, which is rare anywhere.

Note the shape of that sentence. No city worth mentioning; a temple worth crossing the sea for. Tinos was not a place people lived so much as a place people stopped.

The antechamber to Delos

Delos, twenty-five kilometres south-west, was the most sacred island in the Aegean — the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, so holy that by the fifth century BC nobody was permitted to be born or to die on it. Pilgrims bound for Delos purified themselves at Tinos first. Kings, generals and ordinary people sacrificed here before crossing.

This is the literal version of what people mean when they call this a spiritual corridor. It is not a metaphor. It is an itinerary, and Tinos was the first stop on it.

The island’s name is cut on a monument that still stands in Istanbul

In 480 BC, on the night before Salamis, the Greek captains would not believe Aristides’ report that the Persian fleet had encircled them. Then a trireme deserted the Persian side and came over — a Tenian ship, commanded by Panaetius son of Sosimenes — and brought full intelligence of the enemy’s position.

For that, the Tenians were inscribed on the tripod dedicated at Delphi from the Persian spoils. The tripod is long gone; its bronze base, the Serpent Column, was moved to Constantinople by Constantine in 324 and stands in the Hippodrome in Istanbul today.

The Tenian and Siphnian names appear to have been added later — they are cut more crudely than the rest. Which is its own small story: a small island’s name, added afterwards, to a list of the states that saved Greece.

This is the question the family asked first, and the answer is not the one the guidebooks give. Venice did not want this island — and ended up holding it longer than anything else it ever held in this sea. Four moves lie between those two facts, and the rest of this chapter is how each of them happened.

1204: Venice takes what it wants, and Tinos is not on the list

When the Fourth Crusade broke up the Byzantine Empire, Venice knew exactly what it was after: ports, trading stations and naval bases. It took Corfu and the Ionians, Crete, Negroponte, control of the Dardanelles, and three-eighths of Constantinople including the docks and the arsenal.

Tinos and Mykonos were not in that category. They went instead to two brothers, Andrea and Geremia Ghisi, as a private fief — along with Skiathos, Skopelos and Skyros. The Ghisi were Venetians, but this was family enterprise, not state policy, and unusually they never recognised the overlordship of the Duke of Naxos: they held the islands directly from the Latin Emperors in Constantinople, with no lord in between.

1390: the island gives itself to the Republic — with conditions

The last Ghisi died without an heir. Venice, alarmed by the growing Ottoman threat, took over the administration and appointed a Rettore di Tine e Micone. Reactive, not ambitious.

But the Venetian archives describe the transfer from the other side, and it is worth stating precisely. The instrument of 1390 is an accord by which the Tinians submitted to Venice — and it carried terms. One of them was that the production and export of silk should remain free, with the lordship’s revenues confined to lesser levies. Venice spent the next three centuries wanting to tax the island’s most lucrative activity and never managed it.

Put the two together and the character of the relationship is clear. This was not a conquest. It was a contract, and the islanders held two clauses in it that most subject populations of any empire would have envied: their principal export was untaxed, and they could terminate the arrangement. They kept both for three hundred and twenty-five years.

Commercially, it was minor — and it had no harbour

The trunk route of Venice’s Levant trade ran Venice–Corfu–Modon and Coron–Crete–Constantinople. Tinos sat near the northern approach, not on the artery. And Wheler, arriving in 1675, records dropping anchor in a bay on the south side because there was no port on that side of the island. A possession with no harbour on its inhabited coast is not a trading station.

Then everything around it fell

Negroponte in 1470. Mykonos and the Duchy of the Archipelago in 1537, annexed outright in 1579. Nauplia and Monemvasia in 1540. Sifnos in 1617. Crete, finally, in 1669. By 1675 the Republic held only Kythira and Tinos among the islands of this sea.

And that is how a place with no harbour became important: everything else was gone.

Once it was all that remained, it acquired three real jobs

So the answer to the question is that Venice was here by accident and then by necessity. It did not want this island in 1204; it inherited it in 1390 on the islanders’ terms; it discovered a use for it only when everything better had been lost; and it held it, in the end, longer than anything else it ever held in this sea.

And a floor was put under all of this while the book was being written

This chapter, and the two after it, have always rested on soft ground: the assumption that between the end of antiquity and the arrival of the Franks the island goes dark and there is nothing to say. Excavation between 2019 and 2023, by the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades with the National Hellenic Research Foundation, has removed that assumption.

The castle at Xombourgo is Byzantine. The medieval castle of Agia Eleni there has a newly identified phase of the seventh century AD — a square walled enclosure with a large pentagonal tower, built about the time of the Arab raids — later reworked by the Venetians. In the excavator’s own words: after their arrival the Venetians went on using Xombourgo. A

And the harbour at Chora was working continuously from the late Roman period, on ceramic evidence from the same excavation programme: from the third or fourth century AD to the eighth. A

Everyone who writes about these islands writes about pirates arriving. The Venetian archives say something less comfortable: that the Tinians acquired a taste for it during the war for Crete and never lost it, that Venice’s orders against it were ignored, and that the safest island in the Cyclades was where even the Turks hid their money.

Four different things, and they should not be conflated

“Pirates” collapses four phenomena separated by eight centuries, three religions and several bodies of law. Kept apart, they explain the island; treated as one, they explain nothing.

The fourth is the one nobody remembers, and it is the one that took most Greek cargo.

The corsair with a crown

The man in the woodcut is this chapter’s whole argument in one life. Hayreddin Barbarossa was born at Palaiokipos on Lesbos — a Greek island — to a sipahi father, given variously as Turkish or Albanian, and a Greek Orthodox mother, Katerina, of the same island. B The detail of the parentage is contested, and the hedge is part of the record.

He began as a corsair working these waters. By 1533 Suleiman had summoned him to Constantinople and made him Kapudan Pasha — grand admiral of the Ottoman navy. A The Italian caption under the portrait already says it: re d’Algeri, king of Algiers. A pirate with a crown, and then a fleet. The line this chapter keeps drawing — that corsairing and state navies were the same men in different seasons — is not a figure of speech. It was a career, and he is its most complete example.

And 1537, the year that sits in this book’s chronology, was not a raid. It was a fleet campaign: Lütfi Pasha and Barbarossa swept the Venetian Aegean in one season — Syros, Aegina, Ios, Paros, Karpathos, Kasos, Kythira, Naxos — taken, sacked or forced to tribute. B

Set that list out in full, and the sentence this book has already said acquires its weight: the fleet that swept eight islands did not take Tinos.

Modern lists — the English Wikipedia article on Barbarossa among them — still put Tinos in the captured column for 1537, against a date contested by nobody: Venetian until 1715. A The error is a copying chain: one list repeats another, and nobody walks back to the record. It is exactly the kind of second-hand history this book exists to catch, and the reason its own claims carry grades.

Correcting the North Africans

The Barbary corsairs are the ones everybody has heard of, and their part in this sea is smaller than the stories suggest. French sources say the Algerians reserved to themselves la course en «mer du Levant» while Salé took the «mer du Ponant» — and it is worth knowing that in that technical usage “mer du Levant” means the Mediterranean as a whole, against “mer du Ponant”, the Atlantic. It does not mean the Levant. Anyone reading that sentence and concluding the Algerians worked the Aegean has mistranslated a technical term — a phrase that means one thing inside the trade and another outside it.

Italian scholarship states it plainly: in the eastern Mediterranean and the Adriatic, Venetian galley patrols sharply limited Barbary raiding. The documented Barbary mass raids are western — Ischia and Lipari in 1544, Vieste in 1554, Baltimore in Ireland in 1631.

But Algerian ships were in these waters, and twice within sight of this island: the Venetians destroyed seven of them off Chios in 1657, and Lambros Katsonis engaged Algerian vessels off Tinos and Mykonos in 1788. They came as squadrons of the Ottoman war fleet, not as independent raiders hunting villages. Slot also records that the Barbary corsairs several times planned a great attack on Tinos — and never made it.

The pirate economy of the Cyclades

And they were not who you would guess. The principal element of the pirate population of the Cyclades was, in the words of Slot, the Dutch historian, French subjects from Provence and Venetian subjects from Dalmatia — with Greeks among them, both islanders and Maniots. France and Venice were officially at peace with the sultan, so their flags were forbidden on the corso; their pirates simply sailed under Malta, Tuscany or Savoy instead.

And Tinos was not only a victim

This is the part the guidebooks leave out, and it comes from the man Venice appointed to govern the island.

Slot puts it plainly: the islanders kept up their links with Venice’s old allies and took an active part in the corsair war. To avoid incidents with the Turks, the rector — at the instigation of the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople — proclaimed orders forbidding the arming of ships for the corso, participation in it, aid to corsairs, and the sale of booty.

The archival verdict on those orders is one sentence long: « La valeur pratique de ces ordres n’était pas très grande. » Their practical value was not very great.

The chiefs of the Aegean corsairs relocated their base to this island, over the objections of the empire, and Venice did not stop them.

Why here: it was the safest place in the Cyclades

Tinos was attacked like everywhere else — in 1672 the rector complained of violence against villages and of Tinian ships taken by Western corsairs; in 1675 a Tinian vessel was taken by a Muslim one. But the island had something no other island had, and Slot draws the conclusion:

A fortress, a resident governor, a militia and five failed sieges will do that. The consequence is that the same walls that made Tinos safe to live in made it safe to keep a corsair fleet in — and safe for an Ottoman merchant to leave his money in while it happened.

The corsairs who were Catholic

After 1530 the Knights of Malta lost their crusading purpose and their revenues, and turned to the corso. Knights kept a share of the prize. The mechanism that hurt Greek shipping was the doctrine of vista — the claimed right to stop and board any vessel suspected of carrying Ottoman goods, and to confiscate cargo and crew, the crew being the more valuable. A Greek ship out of Chios with a single Ottoman-owned bale aboard was fair game, and its owner’s remedy was to sue in Malta.

The Tuscan Order of St Stephen, based at Livorno, made incursions into the Aegean islands after 1640. And the general statement, from the standard account of Ottoman Greece: after Lepanto, Greek ships “often became the target of attacks by Catholic (especially Spanish and Maltese) pirates.”

Which is the paragraph most readers will not have met before. On a Catholic island under Venetian rule, the corsairs who took Tinian cargo were as likely to be Catholic as Muslim, and the Tinian who lost his boat to a Maltese galley had no better remedy than the one who lost it to an Algerian.

The warning system, and the governor who was kidnapped for abolishing it

There is a tradition that signal fires on Exombourgo could be seen from Chios. It is geometrically possible — Exombourgo at 641 metres and Mount Pelineon on Chios at 1,297 give a combined line of sight of some 219 kilometres against a separation of about 130, with nothing in between. But the documented system is closer to home and better.

It was an early-warning network run between islanders rather than between states — and when a governor abolished it, the neighbouring island kidnapped him for it. That is what the defence of these waters actually looked like from the ground.

How it ended — and 1830 is the wrong date

The Arab phase ended precisely, at Chandax, on 6 March 961. The rest ended slowly and later than most accounts allow.

The Greek War of Independence made it worse before it made it better: besieged insurgents at Gramvousa turned to piracy to survive, and the church there was dedicated to Παναγία ἡ Κλέφτρινα — Our Lady the Piratess. What finished it was a joint Anglo-French naval suppression between 1825 and 1828.

And Tinos was inside it, on both sides of the ledger, exactly as it had been a century and a half earlier. In August 1823 the island community was made to pay 2,000 γρόσια in compensation for the robbery of a French subject by pirates then loose in the area. In May 1825 the Tinians had to fight off a landing party. And in February 1827 Alexandros Mavrokordatos wrote, in the plainest terms, that Tinos and Syros had become the markets where the pirates sold what they took. A

Three dates get used for the end of all this, and only one of them is right for the Aegean. The pirate fleet at Gramvousa was destroyed in January 1828, and that is the honest end-date for these waters. The French took Algiers in 1830 and ended Barbary corsairing, but the Barbary corsairs were never the Aegean’s principal problem, and using 1830 here imports a western-Mediterranean chronology into a Cycladic story.

One last detail, and it is the right note to finish on. The last raid on a Cycladic island that I can find is 1794, and it was Greek — Kefalonians and Maniots plundered Antiparos and carried off the daughter of the Venetian vice-consul. Six years before the end of the eighteenth century, and nine hundred and seventy years after the Andalusians took Crete.

Exombourgo held five times in a hundred and fourteen years, and the Aegean thought it could not be taken. In June 1715 a garrison of perhaps fourteen men gave it up in a day without firing a shot — and because the Ottomans kept the surrender terms exactly, and were seen to keep them, Venetian commanders elsewhere drew the obvious conclusion and did the same. The most consequential thing that ever happened at this fortress is that nothing happened at it. There is no photograph of it and there never can be — it was destroyed before the camera existed — and what survives are two drawings, made in Venetian service ninety years apart.

Exombourgo is a granite plug rising to 641 metres in the middle of the island, visible from most of it and from most of the sea around it. Its name means outside the town — which tells you it was named by people who already lived somewhere else. It has been the island’s refuge since the Iron Age: a wall of about 1100 BC lies below the Venetian work.

At its height the place on top of it was not a garrison but a town: six hundred metres of ramparts with towers facing every direction, and inside them between one and two thousand people, 677 houses and five churches. When the alarm went, the island came up here.

Put the two side by side and you have something rare: the same fortification recorded by two men in the same Venetian service, ninety years apart — one at the height of Venetian confidence, one at the end of it.

Five sieges, five failures

An island of this size holding out five times in a hundred and fourteen years is the reason it was thought unconquerable — and the reason that what happened in 1715 was so shocking.

June 1715

The force that arrived was not a raiding squadron. It was 65 warships and 74 transports carrying some 25,000 soldiers — the fleet of a campaign that would go on to retake the whole Morea that summer.

The population withdrew into the fortress as it had done for five centuries. The fortifications had been in poor condition since about 1700. Accounts of the garrison vary from as few as fourteen soldiers to around fifty.

The Provveditore, Bernardo Balbi, surrendered without fighting.

Because the safe-conduct was honoured, and seen to be honoured, other Venetian garrisons drew the obvious conclusion. Tinos was regarded as unconquerable; news that its governor had given it up without a fight was a blow to Venetian strategy and an ill omen for the campaign — and Ottoman good faith prompted a cascade of surrenders by demoralised garrisons elsewhere. Souda and Spinalonga, the last Venetian footholds off Crete, went the same way later that year.

Which leaves the strangest fact of all, and it belongs to the next chapter. The fortress in these two engravings was not destroyed by the army that took it. It came down two years later, in 1717 — and on one of the two surviving accounts, it was blown up by the islanders themselves, in a case of mistaken identity.

A hundred and six years of Ottoman rule left no mosque, no quarter, no community and — as far as the record goes — no families. The reason is not resistance. It is that the empire arrived a century and a half late, and two years after it arrived the building that would have housed it blew up.

The Cyclades became Ottoman in stages between 1537 and 1579. Tinos did not. It stayed Venetian until 1715, which means that when the empire finally acquired this island, it acquired it a hundred and thirty-six years after Naxos — at the very end of its expansion in these waters, with an administration already too thin to do much with it.

What the surrender actually granted

The terms agreed in June 1715 guaranteed the free withdrawal of the defenders and of any inhabitants who wished to leave, and — the clause that mattered most in the long run — they preserved the rights of both churches, Catholic and Orthodox. The rector and many of the leading families left. The Greeks stayed. And with the disappearance of the capital, and then of the commune of the cittadini, the whole Venetian class structure of the island went with them.

What replaced it was almost nothing. The island was folded into the Eyalet of the Archipelago, but Ottoman administration in the Cyclades was, in Slot’s judgement, “really decadent” and incapable of maintaining a permanent presence. So it did the only thing it could: it collected a lump sum through the village communities and their councils of elders, and otherwise left the island alone. The result was a quasi-autonomy that lasted until 1821.

One qualification should be made, because it is the part the patriotic version leaves out. The Ottomans kept the old levies on the harvest and added a poll tax which began lower than on other Ottoman islands and reached the same level during the eighteenth century. The weight of taxation therefore shifted from the tithe towards the head — which in practice taxed the poor more heavily than the system it replaced. Light-touch government and a lighter burden are not the same thing.

A second qualification comes from the island’s own historian, and it dates the thinning. Δώριζας, following Armakollas’s study of the island’s finances, records that Tinos was held as a τιμάριο — a revenue grant — first by a favourite of the sultan and then by Veli Efendi Zade, master of the Ottoman mint; when he died in 1805 the island passed to the treasury, and with the change of master the privileges went: the exemption from the χαράτσι that Tinians carried with them anywhere in the empire, the fleet kept twelve miles off the coast, the duty-free cargoes. Heavier taxes followed, and the Kapudan Pasha, master of the Aegean, «κατεπάτησε ὅλα τὰ ἀνωτέρω προνόμια» — trampled every one of them. Zallony, writing in 1809, still describes the customs exemption as in force (chapter xxiii), so the two do not quite agree on the date. On the mechanism they do: the elders went on collecting the lump sum to 1821. What thinned in the last sixteen years was the room around it. C

C Γ. Ι. Δώριζας, Η Τήνος επί Τουρκοκρατίας και κατά τον Αγώνα του 1821, Μέρος Τρίτον, Athens 1978, pp. 170–171, citing Ν. Ἀρμακόλλας, Οἰκονομικὰ τῆς νήσου Τήνου 1715–1822, pp. 11–13.

And then, in 1717, the fortress was blown up

Two years after the conquest a Venetian fleet under Flangini entered the Aegean and set off a panic among the Ottomans on Tinos. Two accounts survive of what happened next, and this book gives both because the sources do.

In the first, the Ottomans abandoned the island in a panic, destroying the fortress and the capital as they went. In the second, they withdrew to Euboea and left the local militia to hold Exombourgo in the traditional way — and the militia, sighting a fleet on the horizon, blew the fortress up with the gunpowder the Ottomans had left behind. The fleet was not Venetian. It was Barbary. The islanders then managed to make their action acceptable to the Ottomans, which suggests some very careful explaining.

How many Turks were there? In the whole Cyclades, between one and two hundred

This is where the popular picture and the archives part company completely.

Muslim inhabitants — as distinct from officials — first appear in the Cyclades around 1590. Slot lists the islands where they settled: Naxos, Andros, Paros, Santorini, Ios and Kea, with Syros only after 1617. Tinos is not on that list, and could not be: it was Venetian.

The total number of Muslims in the entire archipelago he puts at 100 to 150, socially isolated. On Naxos around 1640 there were about seventy, with no political influence whatever. Outside Naxos and Andros the settlements were, in his word, éphémères.

And they were not, for the most part, Turks. Slot describes the Muslim inhabitants of Naxos as “en majorité des renégats chrétiens, surtout d’origine grecque” — mostly Christian converts, mostly of Greek origin. Ottoman documents record many of them under the patronymic bin Abdullah, “son of Abdullah,” which is the standard bureaucratic formula for a convert whose father was not a Muslim, and therefore a name that announces itself as first-generation.

They had no mosques. The kadis who were supposed to lead and judge them did not live on the islands. And because they were not members of the local kinotis, they held none of the communal privileges — becoming, in Slot’s phrase, “des étrangers dans leur patrie,” foreigners in their own homeland, dependent on Ottoman institutions elsewhere. By the end of the seventeenth century the last traces of Islamisation in the islands were quietly disappearing.

The traffic ran the other way

So the encounter between this island and the Ottoman Empire was, in the end, almost entirely one-directional. The empire did not settle here. But one Tinian went there.

And note how she left. Not overland, not through any Ottoman administration, but off a shore, by raiders, at fourteen — which is the whole point. The danger to this island was never the Turkish neighbour, because there was no Turkish neighbour. It was whoever came in a ship.

That fear is written into the map. Every village on Tinos is built inland, dense, low, and out of sight of the sea. It is simply written there by pirates, and not by the Ottoman Empire.

A winged lion with its paw on an open book is St Mark, and St Mark is Venice — the Republic’s own badge, stamped on everything it ruled. It was never decoration. It was a sovereignty mark — the visible claim that a place belonged to the Republic — which is exactly why so few survive anywhere, and why almost none survive here.

That distinction is easy to miss and it changes what the stones mean. On Naxos or Andros, a carved coat of arms is a family saying this is mine. On Tinos, for three and a quarter centuries, it was a state saying this is ours.

Where the lion comes from

It is the evangelist-symbol of St Mark, from the four living creatures of Christian iconography. In 828 Venetian merchants carried Mark’s relics out of Alexandria — smuggled, so the story goes, under a cargo of pork — and the city adopted him as its patron. From about 1260 the winged lion stood for Venice itself.

The lion is shown with a book held open under one paw, and the words in it are the whole justification: PAX TIBI MARCE, EVANGELISTA MEVS — Peace to you, Mark, my evangelist — what an angel is said to have told Mark when a storm drove him ashore in the lagoon where Venice would later stand, promising that his body would one day rest there. The sentence in the book is the title deed. Every lion Venice cut into a gate from Dalmatia to Cyprus carried the reason Venice was entitled to be there.

How to read a lion

A halo marks the properly religious depiction — the evangelist rather than the state. In cities on water the lion is sometimes shown with forepaws on land and hind paws in the sea: dominion over the mainland and the maritime empire at once. That motif only makes sense after Venice’s fifteenth-century conquests on the mainland, so it is itself a dating tool.

Why there is none left here, and plenty on Crete

The obvious explanation is that Tinos fell to the Ottomans and Ottomans removed the emblems of the previous sovereign. That is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far, because Crete fell forty-six years earlier and is full of lions.

But there is a Tinian catalogue, and it is not of lions

Alekos Florakis published Οικόσημα Τήνου — Coats of Arms of Tinos — in 2001, and it records sixty-five armorials surviving on this island, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, fifty-four of them in marble, sorted into four classes: emblems of the state, arms of lords, arms of clerics, and the insignia of monastic orders.

That first class is where any surviving Lion of St Mark on Tinos will be itemised. And the headline is far better than the one people repeat: not one lion in a hotel lobby, but sixty-five carved armorials from four regimes, on an island of nine thousand people.

And one lion went the other way

This is a different animal, and it explains a common confusion.

The Naxians dedicated a row of marble lions to Apollo on Delos in the late seventh or early sixth century BC — archaic Greek, wingless, nothing whatever to do with Venice. In 1716 the Venetians took one of them because it reminded them of the Lion of St Mark, fitted it with an incongruous new head, and set it at the entrance to the Arsenale in Venice, where it still stands.

Sources conflict irreconcilably on who took it and when — Morosini in 1694, Admiral Pisani, or Domenico Pasqualigo in 1716. The one hard datum is the inscription it carries, ANNO CORCYRÆ LIBERATÆ, which dates the installation: Corfu was relieved in 1716. One year after Venice lost Tinos, the Republic put a stolen Aegean lion at its own front gate.

Which is the shape of the whole chapter, in two movements. Venice put its lion up all across this sea, and the sea pulled it down. Then Venice took a lion out of the sea, put the wrong head on it, and stood it at its own door — in the same year it lost the last island where its lion had been the law.

And one last thing about loyalty, which is the oldest thing in this book

This island’s name in Venetian is Fedele. The faithful one. It is the compliment the whole book is titled after.

Chapter xi records what Tinos was doing nearly nineteen hundred years before Venice arrived: on the night before Salamis a Tenian trireme deserted the Persian fleet, came over to the Greeks with full intelligence of the enemy’s position, and the Tenians were cut into the tripod at Delphi for it.

Herodotus adds one detail that chapter did not use. With that ship, and one from Lemnos that had come over earlier at Artemisium, the Greek fleet reached exactly three hundred and eighty — “otherwise it fell short by two of that amount.” A Histories VIII.82, verbatim The round number in the account of the battle that saved Greece is made round by two deserters, and one of them was from here.

The last time a great power did something to Tinos, it did it on 15 August, in front of the largest religious gathering in Greece, against a country that was not at war. It is the best-documented event in this book and the least known outside Greece.

The ship, and the name she carried

The Elli was old and she was strange. She had been laid down in Camden, New Jersey, in 1912 for the Chinese Empire — one of three training cruisers ordered by the Qing dynasty, to be called Fei Hung, the Flying Swan. Then the dynasty fell, and the new Chinese republic declined to pay the debts of the one before it. Greece bought her in 1914 for £320,000.

By 1940 she was a 2,600-ton minelayer doing about twenty knots on a good day, with three six-inch guns and a complement of 232. And she was named for the Battle of Elli, fought off the Dardanelles in December 1912 — the victory that had given Greece command of the Aegean in the same war in which Italy took the Dodecanese from the Ottomans.

Why she was here — over the Navy’s objection

She was sent to Tinos to give the Dormition pilgrimage a warship: a ceremonial state presence at the largest religious event in the country, at a moment of acute national anxiety. She lay at anchor about 550 metres off the harbour mole, dressed overall, with part of her crew ashore for the ceremonies.

08:25

The Italian submarine Delfino had sailed from Partheni on Leros — in the Italian Dodecanese — at 20:30 the previous evening, and was off Tinos by half past four in the morning. Her commander was Lieutenant Giuseppe Aicardi.

At about twenty-five past eight he fired three torpedoes from roughly seven hundred metres.

The hit opened the engine room and the oil bunkers and blew a crater in the deck between the funnels. She listed, burned, and went down at about twenty past ten with her colours still flying. Her captain, Angelos Hatzopoulos, meant to go down with her; his officers carried him off the bridge bodily and put him in a boat.

B Take nine dead and about twenty-four wounded as the working figure, and note that war memory hardens around numbers that were never certain. There were casualties ashore as well: at least one civilian died on the quay, of cardiac shock, after the second torpedo exploded against the waterfront, and others were injured by debris and in the panic.

Who did it, and what Greece said

Within days, Greek officers recovered the tail section of one of the torpedoes that had struck the mole. It was unmistakably Italian. A lieutenant named Doussis collected the fragments from the quay on his own initiative.

The Greek government said nothing about it. The press was permitted one formula: the Elli had been “torpedoed by a submarine of unknown nationality.”

Whose order was it? The Italian archives answer this

This is contested in popular accounts and settled in the documents, and the settled version is worse than the popular one.

Aicardi’s own report claimed the Elli had moved towards him and forced his hand. She was moored, dressed overall, and surrounded by festival craft. Italian naval commentary calls the account, flatly, non è credibile.

So: not a personal order from Mussolini, and not one captain’s madness. A licence to kill issued in Rome, pointed at a Greek pilgrimage by a Fascist proconsul in Rhodes, and discharged into a harbour full of worshippers. The Italian historian Giorgio Rochat’s verdict is the one to keep: a perfect example of technical incompetence and criminal indifference.

What is there now

The wreck is gone. It was raised in sections in 1955–56 and sold for scrap; when a diving team went looking in 1983 they recovered a ventilation duct. The state had been laying wreaths for years on a spot from which the ship had quietly been cut away.

What is left of the Elli is in three places. One of her guns stands by the lighthouse at the old harbour, beside a cenotaph shaped like her bow. A fragment of the Italian torpedo is displayed in the Elli Mausoleum. And in that mausoleum, inside the courtyard of the Panagia Evangelistria, is the ossuary of her dead.

The ship on the flag

The island’s own flag deserves the last word here. The municipal flag of Tinos carries a trireme: the ship of Panaetius son of Sosimenes, the Tenian captain who deserted the Persian fleet on the eve of Salamis and brought the Greeks full word of the encirclement — and for whose ship the Tenians were cut into the Serpent Column at Delphi, among the peoples who defeated the barbarian (Herodotus VIII.82–83). A

Above the harbour where the Elli lies, the island flies the ship that chose Greece the night before Salamis.

Which is where this part of the book ends. The island had been a stop for pilgrims for two thousand three hundred years, a Latin fortress for five hundred years — Venetian for three hundred and twenty-five of them — and an Ottoman afterthought for a hundred. The last thing a foreign power did to it was fire three torpedoes into its harbour on a feast morning — and the answer the island gave was to carry the icon down to the water anyway, in the arms of the men who had just swum out of the ship.

There are war memorials in Chora and in five villages, and a monument to the Balkan Wars on the headland at Pasakroteri. Not one of them has been photographed, transcribed or published. There is no list anywhere of this island’s war dead — and war memorials are a listed product of the Tinian marble workshop.

One headland holds three wars

At Πασακρωτήρι, on the headland, there is a monument to the men of this island who died in the Balkan Wars — the schoolchildren of Tinos process to it with the Philharmonic on the eve of every 28th of October. B from the Municipality’s own programmes; I have found no photograph of it and no transcription of it anywhere. Below it is the water in which the Elli was torpedoed on the morning of the Assumption in 1940, the subject of the previous chapter. And the same headland took in refugees from Asia Minor in 1922.

Three wars on one promontory, inside thirty years.

There is a war memorial in Πλατεία Ελευθερίας in Chora, and village ηρώα at Ktikados, Mountados, Triantaros, Kardiani and Kalloni. B

This chapter is not going to invent one. No names, no estimates, no round numbers. What follows is what the record actually holds, which is less than it should be and stranger than nothing.

The occupation was run from Rhodes, not Athens — which made it odd even by the standards of occupations

Tinos was garrisoned by the Italians from Rhodes, not from Athens — run as an appendix of the Dodecanese command rather than as part of occupied Greece. The governor at Rhodes was styled governor “of the Dodecanese, of the Cyclades and of the northern Sporades”, and the units that took Tinos in May 1941 sailed from Kos. B

Which is worth holding beside the previous chapter, because the order to sink the Elli in this island’s harbour was issued from Rhodes as well, by Governor De Vecchi, the day before the feast. Tinos’s war was administered from the Dodecanese from the first shot to the last.

The clean negatives, which are part of the answer

There was no civil war on this island — no local violence, no local trials. Nothing specific to Tinos survives from the Asia Minor campaign. No famine mortality data for Tinos has been published, though the island’s own school heritage projects speak of the time of the hunger and of soup kitchens said to have saved hundreds of children, so this is an absence of figures and not an absence of hunger. And Tinos was never used as a place of political exile — unlike Ikaria, Ai Stratis, Makronisos, or Gyaros twenty kilometres off the west coast, where it was done on a scale nowhere else matched.

An island can be very near the twentieth century without being in it.

The inversion

The Greek Ministry of Culture, in the National Inventory entry for Tinian marble craftsmanship, lists the carved types the island’s workshops produced: tomb slabs, then neoclassical funerary monuments, then ηρώα — war memorials. A the Ministry’s own wording, in its own inventory.

So war memorials are a listed product of the Tinian marble workshop. This island carved other communities’ dead into stone as a trade, and it is very likely that some of the ηρώα standing in other Greek villages came off benches at Pyrgos and Ysternia.

On every other island the Franks held, Catholicism stayed a thin aristocratic crust inside the castle quarter. On Tinos it took the farmers. That is the anomaly, it is genuinely unexplained, and it is the reason this island is not like its neighbours.

The numbers, corrected

The Archdiocese lists twenty-three Catholic parishes on Tinos — the map above gives the shape of it, and the full roll is in the note below. The seat is Xinara; the parish church there is Sts Peter and Paul, and the cathedral, a separate building in the same village, is Panagia tou Rodariou — Our Lady of the Rosary.

The twenty-three: Tinos town, Steni, Myrsini, Kechros, Potamia, Koumaros, Volax, Skalados, Krokos, Loutra, Xinara, Kampos, Smardakito, Tarabados, Kardiani, Ktikados, Perastra, Komi, Agapi, Kato Kleisma, Aetofolia, Karkados and Kalloni.

It is often said that half the island is Catholic. That was true once and is not true now. The best modern figure is about 3,000 Catholics out of 8,934 people — roughly a third. Tozer in 1890 could still write “more than half the population”, and the Italian record around 1640 put it at three-quarters. The direction of travel is clear and the figure should be given as of a date, not as a fact.

The anomaly

Here is what makes this island strange, and it is worth stating carefully because it is easy to get backwards.

Across the Frankish Aegean, Catholicism was the religion of the conquerors. It sat on top of a Greek population as a thin aristocratic layer inside the castle quarter, and when the lords left, it left with them. That is the pattern on Naxos, on Andros, on Paros.

On Tinos — and on Syros — it did not do that. The rural population became Catholic. Whole farming villages, across the ordinary countryside, outside any castle quarter and below any social barrier. As one Greek account puts it: here the majority of the population, in all the agricultural communities and beyond the social compartments of the other islands, embraced Catholicism.

Why it happened is genuinely unknown

The obvious explanation is that Venice promoted it. Venice did not. The Republic and the Papacy were permanent rivals, and Venice had no desire to see papal influence inside its own possessions. Its administrative categories are those of a state managing a mixed population, not converting one: it classified the islanders as greci and as cattolici di rito greco — Catholics of the Greek rite.

What can be said is what the geography shows. The Catholic villages are the interior — the fertile centre and much of the Ano Meri, clustered around Exombourgo. That is the footprint of a castle and its parishes radiating outward, and it is emphatically not the pattern refugee settlement by sea produces, which is coastal. The Jesuits founded their house in 1663 inside the castle, and only came down to Loutra in 1835. The centre of gravity of Catholicism on this island is the fortress, not the harbour.

Add to that the plainest structural fact available: five hundred and eight years of unbroken Latin lordship, from 1207 to 1715 — longer than anywhere else in the Aegean, and uniquely as directly administered Venetian territory rather than a feudal fief. That is the condition under which a rural Latin-rite peasantry can form and persist. It is not a proof. It is the best available account.

Three different quarrels run through what follows, and they are worth keeping apart. Venice against Rome — two Catholic powers elbowing each other, which is why the Republic never pushed conversion. The two communities against each other — but only over mixed marriages and precedence in processions: arithmetic, not doctrine. And once, in 1821, community against state, for two years. What never appears on the list is neighbour against neighbour — and that absence is the finding of this chapter.

1821, and the flag

There is one episode where the seam opened, and this book includes it because leaving it out would be a kind of lie.

When the Greek Revolution began, the Catholic communities of the Aegean invoked their long-standing French protection and declared themselves neutral. A On Syros that became something concrete: the French flag went up over the churches, and in February 1823 the Catholics there appealed to the King of France against the revolutionary captain Nestor Faziolis. B

What Tinos did with a flag is not documented. What happened on Tinos is. The Catholic bishop of the island, Giovanni Collaro, observed and preached strict neutrality — and that neutrality, in the words of the most recent scholarly account of the Catholic islands in the revolution, “revived old frictions and was used as a pretext for Orthodox attacks on Catholic properties and chapels.” A Members of the Catholic community had nonetheless been present at the assembly of April 1821 at which the Orthodox majority voted to join the insurrection. A

The other thing on record here is narrower and less dramatic: the eparch of Tinos complained in 1822 that its Catholics, “recognising no Greek administration, rendered nothing, although holding the most fertile parts”, and in a longer complaint that they did not cease to harass, insult and steal animals. C

The context is not an excuse but it is necessary. This was a community that had been Venetian for five centuries and Ottoman for one, whose protection had always come from outside, and whose institutional world was Latin. Its instinct in a crisis was to look west. That instinct was wrong, and it cost them.

And today they share the date

The two communities of Tinos keep the same fixed feasts, which is unremarkable. What is remarkable is that they keep the same Easter. The Catholic Church in Greece adopted the Orthodox date in the 1970s — for the sake of mixed marriages and school holidays — and the Archdiocese’s own Holy Week programme confirms it: in 2025, Catholic Pascha on Tinos fell on 20 April, the Orthodox date.

The Catholic parishes here also carry an Ἐπιτάφιος on Good Friday: a Byzantine usage, kept by Greek Catholics from before their transition to the Roman rite, and still carried through Latin villages.

Syros is the island famous for this — for its two Easters and its joint celebrations, and it is written about every year. On Tinos the story is quieter and, I think, larger. Here they simply share the date, and nobody makes a feature of it.

Everything about the timing of this discovery is extraordinary, and almost nobody says so. Two years into the Greek Revolution, on an island that had been Venetian for five centuries, a nun’s vision led to the finding of an icon of the Annunciation — and the Annunciation is the day the Revolution had chosen as its own.

What happened

In 1822 a nun of the monastery of Kechrovouni — Pelagia, Πελαγία — reported repeated visions of the Virgin, directing her to a field and telling her to have it dug. The elders were told. Digging began. And on 30 January 1823, in the ruins of a Byzantine church, an icon of the Annunciation was found.

A church was raised over the site and the icon was placed in it. Within a generation it was the destination of the largest pilgrimage in Greece, and it has stayed that way for two hundred years.

And it is standing on older ground

Chapter xi set out the sanctuary at Kionia, where Poseidon was worshipped as a physician and Amphitrite healed women who could not conceive, and where pilgrims purified themselves before crossing to Delos — and Tozer’s observation, given there in full, that the church probably stands where Poseidon’s temple stood, the god’s role passed to St Nicholas, guardian of sailors, for whom the port town is named.

So the sequence on or beside this ground runs: a sea-god who healed the sick; the patron saint of sailors; and an icon to which the sick are still carried. Two thousand three hundred years, one function, three names.

The pilgrimage

There are four days. 30 January, the finding of the icon, marked by a procession of lanterns through Chora. 25 March, the Annunciation, which is also the national day. 23 July, the vision of Pelagia, marked by an eight-kilometre night procession returning the icon to Kechrovouni. And above all 15 August, the Dormition.

Pilgrims come off the ferry and cross the eight hundred metres from the wharf to the church on their hands and knees, up the length of the avenue, on a strip of carpet laid for the purpose. Many are bringing a sick person, or the promise of one.

What the icon pays for

This is the part of the story that is never told, and it is the most surprising thing in Part Three.

The shrine is not run by a parish or a diocese. It is the Πανελλήνιο Ἱερὸ Ἵδρυμα Εὐαγγελιστρίας Τήνου — the Panhellenic Holy Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos — a legal entity of public law, governed by a committee elected every three years and chaired by the Metropolitan, with annual revenues of over €3.5 million.

Two things about it are unique in Greece. The board is ten people: six elected, who must be born on the island and Orthodox; the bishop as president honoris causa; and then the head of the island’s secondary school, the judge, and the head of its tax office — the local representatives of the state. The priests who serve the church are its employees and do not sit on it. A

Which makes this the only church in Greece answering directly to the state rather than to the Synod, through the Ministry of Education and Cults and the Ministry of the Economy. The official Church has tried more than once to bring it in. Between 1903 and 1908 the bishop of the island went as far as ordering the priests to stop saying mass in it. A

The arrangement goes back to a “testament” deposited in January 1825 by the council that had run the excavation. It laid down that the building would be neither a parish church nor a monastery but an Institution, whose charge was to pay teachers and maintain schools. Those schools were running from 1825, when Greece as a state had no education system at all. B

And its statute does not let it keep the money.

Which closes a circle that runs through this whole book. The marble chapter asked how a village of a few hundred people supplied the sculptors of a nation, and gave the mechanical answers — the quarries, the family workshops, the four-year apprenticeship, the chest of tools. Here is the financial one. The pilgrimage pays for the marble school. An icon found in a field in 1823 has been funding the education of stone-carvers for a century and a half.

It is also, by some distance, the largest redistribution of money on this island — from the pilgrims, through a public-law foundation, to an old people’s home and an art school.

Tinos has over a thousand chapels. They are private, they belong to families, and each has a name-day. That single fact explains more about how this island works than anything else in this book — and the calendar it produces is bent out of shape by something entirely modern.

Seven hundred and fifty, and somebody actually counted them

The round thousand that circulates is worth nothing: the 2025 news story that carried it gives “more than a thousand chapels” with no attribution at all, and the number was already in the Greek press by 2011. D

There are two real counts, and both are better than the rumour.

Maria Vidali, an architect who wrote her doctorate on the farming landscape of this island, surveyed the outlying chapels and published the result in Γη και Χωριό: τα ξωκλήσια της Τήνου (2009): «επτακόσια πενήντα εξωκλήσια» — seven hundred and fifty. B as reported; the book was published by the former Municipality of Exombourgo, and whether the figure covers the whole island or that municipality alone has not been confirmed from the book itself.

And the practice has a dated witness, from inside. Zallony, in 1809: around the villages stand many little churches; the lamps in them are lit every Saturday; the parish priest comes once a year to say the liturgy there; and on the great feasts they serve as stations for the litanies passing from one parish to the next. C Two centuries before anyone counted them, the chapels were already doing exactly what this chapter describes — burning oil on Saturdays, waiting for their one liturgy a year, and standing along the processional roads.

And for the Catholic side alone, Fr Markos Foskolos — the island’s own Catholic archivist, writing under the Archdiocese’s name — puts it at «ο συνολικός τους αριθμός πλησιάζει τις τρεις εκατοντάδες»: approaching three hundred. B

Two counts, two confessions, thirty years apart, and one fits inside the other. The arithmetic that reconciles them to “over a thousand” once the parish churches and monasteries are added is this book’s, not a source’s, and is offered as a reading rather than a finding.

What is not in doubt is the character of them. They are not parish churches. They stand more than one to every dozen residents. They are family property, built and maintained down the generations, and they are kept by “octogenarians and Gen Z members, goat farmers and hotel owners, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and self-described atheists.”

Nicoleta Nazou walks up daily to look after her husband’s family chapel of Agia Paraskevi, built in the sixteen hundreds. Asked why:

“It’s our responsibility first of all, it goes from generation to generation as an heirloom.”

Who owns a chapel

The thing that is never explained, and that explains everything else, is what one of these buildings actually is in law. A chapel on Tinos is a title deed you are not allowed to sell.

On the Orthodox side, a privately owned church may be built and operated only by permission of the Metropolitan; the owner keeps it only for so long as it serves the religious needs of his own family; and the bishop may close a chapel, or hand it to the nearest parish, if that condition fails. B And a consecrated church is, in the Civil Code’s own words, a thing outside commerce — πράγμα εκτός συναλλαγής: it cannot be sold, cannot be mortgaged, cannot be seized by creditors, and cannot be taken by long possession. A

On the Catholic side it is almost identical, and older: a private chapel exists by permission of the local ordinary, Mass may be said in it only with his leave, and it is to be reserved for worship, free of all domestic use. A

The instruments: Regulation 8/1979 of the Holy Synod, art. 13 §1 (ΦΕΚ Α΄1/5-1-1980) · Compulsory Law 2200/1940, art. 6 §1 · Civil Code art. 966 · canons 1226, 1228 and 1229 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Which explains the thing this chapter otherwise only describes: why the heirs fly in for the name-day from Athens and Brussels and New York. It is not only sentiment. It is the only form of access anyone has to an asset that can never be realised, split among cousins who cannot even sell it to each other.

And here is the part that is Tinian. About three hundred of these buildings stand under the Code of Canon Law and the Latin archbishop at Xinara. The rest stand under Regulation 8/1979 and the Orthodox Metropolitan of Syros. Almost nowhere else in Greece — Syros is the other island — does “our chapel” mean two different legal things four kilometres apart.

Why they stand out on the fields rather than in the villages has an answer too, and it belongs to the woman who counted them. Vidali’s account is that the Venetians granted land rights to the farmers of Tinos as a buffer against the Ottomans, and that the Ottomans, once they took over, let the locals keep that farmland and build on it. B attributed to her, not asserted. She also records what they were founded for: vows for a safe passage made by sailors’ families, memorials to the dead, and dedications to the Virgin.

Two different things are both called a panigiri

The first is the church feast: vespers on the eve, liturgy in the morning at a parish church or an outlying chapel, and then hospitality. The second is the summer γλέντι — an open-air evening in a village square or a school yard, organised by the village association, with a hired band and a ticket.

They have come apart, and you can prove it from the dates. The Catholic parish of Kampos keeps its patronal feast on Trinity Sunday, in June — and holds its village glenti on 29 August. Xinara’s parish feast is 29 June; its glenti is 13 August.

There is no Tinian national dish, and that is the finding

Most Cycladic islands have one panigiri meal. Amorgos slaughters some hundred and fifty sheep and goats and two cows a year and cooks patatato in twenty cauldrons of four hundred kilos apiece, with seven hundred and fifty loaves from donated grain and a named head cook commanding the kitchens.

Tinos does none of that. No source in any language describes a Tinian feast built around a communally slaughtered animal. What the island does instead is more particular, and rather more interesting:

Two of the four are meatless and one is fish. What is offered at most Tinian feasts is not a meal at all but a κέρασμα — a spread put together by the families of the parish — or an invitation into the houses of the village, one after another.

What the Catholics keep that the Orthodox do not

The two communities share the fixed feasts and, since the 1970s, share Easter. But the Catholic year on Tinos carries things that belong to Rome and to nowhere else in the Cyclades on this scale.

Corpus Christi — ἡ Λιτανεία τῆς Ἁγίας Δωρεᾶς, the Procession of the Holy Gift — kept on the Thursday after Pentecost as a pan-island procession. In 2022 it went from Agios Nikolaos in Chora to Agios Antonios at Pallada, with the Archbishop carrying the Blessed Sacrament, the clergy, the seminarians, the Tinos Philharmonic, children in white scattering flowers, and the civil and military authorities.

Panagia tou Rodariou, Our Lady of the Rosary, proclaimed patroness of the local Church by Bishop Nikolaos Sigalas (the Nicolaus Cigala of chapter vi) in 1725 — ten years after the Ottoman conquest and eight after the fortress came down. A community that had just lost its capital chose a patron and started its year again. The feast is the first Sunday of October, and it still opens the Catholic pastoral year.

And the Vrysiotissa pilgrimage in May, founded in 1913 on a vow made the year before, when four young men of the village left for the Balkan Wars. Since 1967 it has included a blessing of drivers and their vehicles — which is what a vow looks like after a century of being kept.

The chapels are the thing to end on. An island of nine thousand people maintains more than a thousand of them, privately, at family expense, across every faith and none — and people fly in from Paris and London for a chapel’s name-day. That is not piety, exactly. It is the same instinct as the reconciliation rule and the chest of tools: a small place inventing, over and over, reasons that oblige its people to turn up for one another.

There is no coffin. The body is wrapped in a shroud and laid in a vault; three years later the bones are lifted, washed, and moved to a box in the cemetery. Anyone raised in France finds this strange. The interesting discovery is that France did the same thing until about 1800 — and the question worth asking is not why Tinos still does it, but why France stopped.

What actually happens

A first-hand description, from the Catholic village of Skalados, is worth setting out plainly because most accounts of this are secondhand and vague.

The dead person is wrapped in a shroud and placed in a vault which has a dirt floor, cement sides and a marble cover. There are eight such vaults in the village. After three years the vault is opened to make room for the next, the bones are lifted, washed with wine, and taken to a chapel in the cemetery where the family’s remains are kept. Memorial masses are said on the third, ninth and fortieth day after a death.

That is the seam of chapter xix showing up in the one place nobody looks for it. On the surface these villages are Catholic — Latin parishes, a Latin archbishop, Corpus Christi processions, the Rosary. Underneath, at the moment of a death, they do what their Orthodox neighbours do.

The Venetian explanation does not work

The natural guess is that this is a Venetian inheritance — a lagoon city’s horror of disease and lack of ground, exported to its possessions. It is a good guess and the dates destroy it.

The real reason, and the practitioners give it themselves

It is space. Eight vaults in Skalados; three years; and then room for the next. The Orthodox village of Mochos on Crete does the same and its priest lists the reasons on the record: faster decomposition, a cemetery of about a hundred and seventy plots, and monastic precedent.

Greek law is built around the practice rather than against it. Graves are held on renewable three-year terms; the ossuary niche has a legal size — thirty centimetres by thirty by fifty-five; and every cemetery must have a χωνευτήριο, a common depository for bones that no family claims.

That is a country whose statutes assume that a grave is a stage in a process and not a permanent address.

Which is what Catholic Europe assumed too, until about 1800

A family from Kato Kleisma who found Tinian burial strange would be measuring it against a French convention roughly two hundred years old. Measured against the thousand years before that, it is Paris that changed its mind.

Four travellers, across two hundred years, say the same thing about this island — and three of them say it comparatively, against everywhere else they had been. But not one of them describes a character. They describe terraces, silk, and a tax bill.

Books about Greek islands tend to tell you that the people are warm, hospitable and hardworking. It is almost always true and it is almost never informative. So this chapter takes a narrower route: what did people who were actually here write down, and did they say anything about Tinos that they did not also say about its neighbours?

Four witnesses

That is the earliest explicitly comparative statement about this island, and it is worth reading twice — because the cause Randolph gives is not a virtue. It is a tax regime. They are better off because they pay only the tithe.

Randolph is not a flatterer, either. Four pages later, on Mykonos: “Most of the Inhabitants are Privateers… leaving their women to their own discretion, and the Civility of strangers.” Same man, same voyage, same book. The judgement on Tinos means something because the judgement on Mykonos is available beside it.

A superlative, from the most systematic traveller in the Aegean of his century, and — this matters — from a professional botanist. Tournefort was qualified to judge cultivation in a way that almost nobody else who wrote about these islands was.

Not the Tinians are industrious, which would be an adjective. A rare instance of industry in these countries — which is a comparison, made by a man who had been to a great many of them.

And every one of them who gives a reason gives a material one

This is the part that keeps the chapter honest. Randolph attributes the island’s condition to the tax. Tournefort attributes it to the silk — sixteen thousand pounds a year, the wealth of the island. Tozer attributes it to the walls. Only Turner uses the word industry at all, and he uses it as a foreigner comparing one place with another.

The machine, seen from inside

Randolph names the cause and leaves it there. The island’s own doctor, a hundred and twenty years later, describes the machine — and the first thing to notice is who is running it. The tax is assessed by the islanders on themselves: the δημογέροντες order each village to prepare its share, and every household is rated by what it has — so much for a beehive, for a horse, a goat, a house, a dovecote; children pay nothing until their fifteenth year. C

Enforcement, in the ordinary run of things, is a piece of paper. A defaulter’s house is sealed — a strip of paper fixed with soft wax, the seal often a coin, the παρά, worth three French centimes — and Zallony notes the astonishing part: the elders command no armed force whatever, and are obeyed. When they are not, the island has its own alarm — the bell, repeated from village to village, “so that in a flash the alarm is transmitted over the whole island.” Then Constantinople sends the machine’s other face: a voevoda who has pre-paid half the tax and comes to collect it with interest, seats himself at Kampos, in the centre of the island, and squeezes until — Zallony’s own image — the compressed spring unwinds: the islanders mass from all sides, and the man flees “taking the gold in slabs”, leaving the island poorer and free of him. The elders resume their seats, on the principle the doctor states in Latin: minima de malis — of two unavoidable evils, choose the lesser. C

And one privilege sat under all of it. Tinos paid no customs duties of any kind — and for eight λεπτά a Tinian could buy a paper certifying only that he was a Tinian, and travel anywhere in the Ottoman Empire on it, exempt from the χαράτσι that every other subject of the sultan paid at sixteen francs for the long-robed and eight for everyone else. A passport that said nothing but the island’s name, and it was enough.

C Zallony (1809), «Η σημερινή κατάσταση», pp. 15–17 of the 2023 Greek translation. The editor of that edition adds a note worth the whole chapter: of the sixty to seventy thousand francs the island raised each year, the regular tax actually owed to the Porte was about 33,000 γρόσια — the rest was the cost of running the island’s own administration. Even the tribute, on inspection, was mostly Tinos paying for Tinos.

So the reputation of this island is a reputation for cultivation — and cultivation is what a light tax regime, a protected silk export written into the terms of 1390, and a hundred thousand retaining walls look like from the deck of a passing ship. The trait is downstream of the terrain and the terms. That is not flattery; it is economic history with people in it.

Three habits, which are better evidence than any adjective

Where the sources do become specific, they stop describing feelings and start describing arrangements. Three of them point the same way, and none of them is warmth.

An indenture, a negotiation, and a reconciliation. What those three have in common is not warmth but enforceable obligation — three institutions for keeping promises in a place where everyone is related, the land is minutely divided, and a large share of the working men are abroad.

What Tinians say about themselves

Very little is written down, and what there is comes from people speaking about their chapels rather than about themselves. Four of them, unrelated, interviewed in 2025:

“This tradition and custom that connect us between members of the family is part of our identity. I’m fully committed to maintaining and passing them down to my children.” — Ioanna Krikelli, on a chapel of the seventeenth century

“It’s our responsibility first of all, it goes from generation to generation as an heirloom.” — Nicoleta Nazou

“Christianity has religious aspects but also cultural aspects. It brings a lot of people together. I want to keep it going.” — Giannis Kafantaris, aged 26

“All this helps to form a sense of community. In these little chapels, one becomes a brother with everyone else.” — Fr Markos Foskolos, fifty years a priest on this island

Notice what none of them says. Not hospitable, not hardworking, not warm. All four say the same different thing: responsibility, heirloom, passing down, keeping it going. Inheritance as an obligation. That is a self-image, it is consistent across four people who have nothing to do with each other, and it is not the one the brochures use.

A note from the author

Everything above is evidence. What follows is opinion, and mine.

One observation from outside the family, offered because it happens to fit. The three habits set out above — the apprenticeship that ends with a chest of tools handed over before witnesses, the field boundary that is a conversation renewed with a neighbour and arbitrated by elders, the Easter table you may not sit at until you have made up your quarrel — are all, at bottom, machinery for the same thing. They are ways of making sure that obligation between people stays enforceable.

Which is the institutional form of “you are never alone.” And the same machinery, seen from an angle a degree or two different, is the pride, and the closedness, and the long memory for a quarrel that requires a rule about Easter tables to settle. It is one trait. The travellers saw the terraces and called it industry; a Frenchman looking at it from Saint-Paul-de-Vence calls it Corsican; and what it actually is, is a small place where everyone is related, the land is divided past counting, half the men have always been abroad, and the only thing holding any of it together is that people keep their word.

Counting Tinians is harder than it sounds, and the difficulty is the interesting part. Church registers and tax rolls disagree by design. And the modern census asks two different questions — where do you live, and where do you belong — and on this island they give different answers. That gap is the diaspora, measured.

Before the census: two sets of books that could not agree

There was no census in the modern sense until the Greek state made one. What exists for the eighteenth century is two parallel bodies of paperwork kept by two authorities who wanted opposite things from the number.

The Catholic archdiocese counted souls, because souls were its business, and a bishop reporting to Rome has no incentive to undercount his flock. The Ottoman treasury counted taxable men between twelve and sixty, because that was what could be charged, and every community in the empire had an incentive to make that number as small as it could be made to look.

One village, counted every time anybody counted

The series above is the island’s, and for most of this book’s writing it was the weakest thing in it. There is a village series that is better still, and it is better precisely because it is small.

The village association of Volax has published the population of its own village at every recorded count from 1756 to 2021, compiled from the archives of the Catholic Archbishop, the parish register — titled, in Italian, the Libro Maestro di Vulacus — the registers of the former municipality of Sostheniou–Peraias from 1855, and the state censuses from 1879. B a village association transcribing archives, not a critical edition — but the archives it names are real, named, and Catholic

And there is a second village series, from the same archive, which fills the gap the first one leaves. The Volax chart above has nothing between 1793 and 1835, because nobody counted the village in those years. The Catholic registers did count others. Quoted from Foskolos’s census study — the one that is not online — by a historian citing it page by page: B

Two things follow. The first is that the Catholic interior was growing, not shrinking, across the revolution — which is the opposite of what the island series at the head of this chapter shows, and another reason not to trust it. The second is closer to home: Kalloni and Komi in 1793 held between them almost eight hundred people. Their resident populations in 2021 are 192 and 203. A The villages of chapter xxviii held twice as many people two hundred and thirty years ago as they hold now.

The peak, and the emptying

Tinos was once, by a wide margin, the most populous island of the Cyclades. A figure of twenty-eight thousand circulates in Greek popular writing, set against a Naxos of no more than six thousand. It is not printed here as a number. This book first believed the number untraceable; the compilation corrected that, and the truth is better than a mystery. Pasch van Krienen wrote “about 28,000” in 1770 — and Krienen is the Archipelago’s most cheerful inflator. Kapodistrias’s memorandum of 1828, written to persuade Europe that Greece was worth its independence, set the same figure for the eve of the revolution. An inflator and an advocate: between them they explain where the number every taverna knows comes from — and why it stands forty per cent above the twenty thousand the eyewitnesses keep returning to. The relative claim — that Tinos was the most populous — stands on the traveller record below. It does not need rescuing by an advocate’s round figure.

What the record does hold is four named eyewitnesses, across a hundred and twenty-seven years, saying the same thing.

A Randolph and Turner read verbatim from the printed pages. Choiseul-Gouffier at one remove, C. Zallony read in full in the 2023 Greek translation published by the association of his own village («Οι Φίλοι του Κρόκου»), p. 15; the 1809 French remains the citation of record. B

One caution, and it matters. “About twenty thousand”, three times over a hundred and twenty-seven years, is a traveller consensus, not three measurements: travellers read each other, and a round number already in print is the easiest thing in the world to repeat. Which is exactly why the fourth voice matters most — the native goes higher, not lower. Zallony, who did not need to copy anybody about his own island, wrote 23 to 25,000. A copied number agrees; an independent one differs.

And the archive behind that sentence holds one thing no traveller ever produced: a census. In 1663, mid-way through the war for Crete, the island was counted head by head — 7,548 people: 3,603 males and 3,945 females; of the males, 1,009 boys under twelve, 2,174 men of working age, 295 past sixty. A It is the earliest count of Tinos that deserves the word — and the surplus of women over men, on an island already sending its sons to sea and to Smyrna, is the whole of chapter xxv in a single row of figures.

Turner also contradicts himself, and the book prefers to say so: at page 100, describing the outward voyage of 1812, he writes that “the island contains about 66 villages”. Sixty-four is his considered figure and the one the modern count matches, but it is not his only one.

The revolution decade, counted twice

One document catches the island on the eve of the storm and again after it had passed. A French statistical broadsheet of 1856, tabulating Greece δήμος by δήμος, carries paired figures for 1821 and 1832 — the only view this book has found of the island’s interior geography across the war.

B «Renseignements statistiques sur la Grèce», a broadsheet of 4 March 1856, via K. Komis, Ιστορική δημογραφία του νεοελληνικού χώρου (2002); reproduced in Dimitropoulos, pp. 235–236. One chain, printed a generation after the fact — read the shape, not the last digit.

Read the middle rows against each other. The town’s δήμος lost a quarter of its people across the decade, and so did Peraia — the δήμος of this family’s three villages, where twenty-nine people of this name would be counted in 1875. The marble north alone grew. And the Peraia figure sits oddly beside the parish counts of its own villages — Kellia, Komi, Karkados, all larger in 1835 than in 1793. Both records can be honest: a δήμος can bleed through a war and its villages refill after it. The tension is printed here rather than smoothed, and the archivist who could resolve it is the one this chapter keeps returning to.

Two centuries later there are 8,934 residents in sixty-four settlements. The same villages, in most cases the same houses, with fewer than half the people.

A for 2021 (ELSTAT). C for the Tinos figure of c. 1800 (Turner, 1814). The point is the reversal: the island that had three or four times the people of Naxos now has fewer than half.

Where the nine thousand are

Almost all of the decline is a decline of the villages. Chora — the port town, which barely existed as a settlement before the nineteenth century, because for five hundred years the population lived up at the fortress and inland — now holds more than half the island.

A Municipality of Tinos, publishing the 2021 census. The full list of sixty-four sums exactly to 8,934.

Two of those rows are worth stopping on. The seat of a Catholic archbishopric has eighteen residents. And the village that once housed the Jesuit college and the Ursuline boarding school — which took girls from Athens, Smyrna and Egypt — has seventeen.

Which villages are growing, and which are going

The number that says the most, and nobody quotes it

A Greek census records two populations. The resident population (μόνιμος) is who actually lives there. The legal or registered population (νόμιμος) is who is inscribed on the municipal roll — where a person belongs, which for most Greeks is where their family is from, and which is where they must go to vote.

For nearly everywhere in Greece the resident figure is the larger one. On Tinos it is not.

That thousand is not an abstraction. It is the Athens flat, the Piraeus office, the ship, the restaurant in Brussels or Johannesburg or Sydney — and the house in the village with the shutters closed for eleven months. Every August it comes back, and for two weeks the resident figure and the registered figure are the same number.

Every picture of a Greek island has a boat in it. Tinos is the exception, and it is documented as one. This island lived off its own surface, and when the surface could no longer feed the people on it, what left was not a cargo. It was a trade, carried in the hands of the men who knew it.

Not a sailors’ island

The standard survey of the Cyclades in the seventeenth century is precise about which islands made a living from the sea. Shipping mattered — as ownership, and more importantly as employment aboard foreign vessels — at Mykonos, Milos, Kimolos and Sifnos.

Tinos is not on that list. And Tinos was, at the time, by some distance the most populous island in the group.

Four things this island has sold, in order

1 · Silk, until it wasn’t

Set out in chapter iv: sixteen thousand pounds of raw silk a year at Tournefort’s visit in 1700, the wealth of the island, and a trade written into the terms of the Venetian arrangement. It is the reason the island was rich enough to be described as better off than any of its neighbours. It faded in the nineteenth century, undercut by industrial production elsewhere, and today the mulberry trees are what remain of it.

2 · Marble, and the eighty years it travelled

The craft is old and local. What is remarkable is the short, intense window in which it became an export of people.

The Greek Ministry of Culture dates the expansion precisely: the Tinian marble tradition extends to Athens μετὰ τὸ 1830 — after 1830, that is, immediately upon the founding of the Greek state, which needed a capital built and had no one else who could carve it. From Athens the circuit widened.

D for the 8,000 and 3,000 figures, which come from popular local history rather than a register. They are given here because the order of magnitude is corroborated by everything else — but they are not a count.

3 · Leaving

There were two emigrations from this island, and only the second one emptied it. The first ran for at least two hundred years before the Greek state existed, and it was circular: people went out to work, saved, and came home to buy land. The second, from about 1900, was permanent. They are usually told as one story. They are not one story, and the plate above belongs to the first.

Zallony’s row in that table deserves to be read at full length — because the book it comes from is now on this family’s shelf, bought in a Tinos bookshop in the Greek translation published by the association of his own village. What the doctor wrote in 1809 is the whole mechanism of this chapter in one breath:

B Zallony, Voyage à Tine (1809), read in the 2023 Greek translation (Σύλλογος «Οι Φίλοι του Κρόκου»), pp. 49–50; the French original remains the citation of record. The land made expensive by home-comers, in 1809, is this chapter’s προτίμηση loop — described by an eyewitness two centuries before the argument.

And the first to go were women. This is the part that reverses the usual picture, and it connects this chapter to chapter iv. The women of Tinos, working the island’s own silk, had specialised in knitting silk goods — above all stockings, which were known in Europe for how long they lasted. That is a skill, acquired at home, in a trade with an export market. From the second half of the eighteenth century they began to leave with it, many of them travelling alone, for Smyrna, Constantinople and Thessaloniki. A

What they were hired for was not silk. It was service — and the reputation they had was specific: reliable, honest, and particularly fond of cleanliness. Two other things helped, and both are this book’s subject. Many of them were Catholic. And five centuries of Venice had left them familiar with how Western Europeans lived. To a French or Italian household in Smyrna, a Catholic girl from Tinos who knew what a fork was for and did not have to be taught the calendar was worth more than a girl from anywhere else in the Aegean. A

Why these trades, and not others? The obvious explanation is that the Ottoman conquest of 1715 drove people out, and it is the one the older Tinian histories give. Dimitropoulos rejects it, and his reason is better. Emigration was already substantial in the seventeenth century, and it ran towards Ottoman territory rather than away from it — so it cannot have been flight. What 1715 ended was something else: Venetian Tinos was a fortress, and a fortress needs town trades. Carpenters, cooks, shoemakers, servants, the skills of a garrison and a governor’s household. After 1715 the island became one Ottoman island among many, the apparatus was dismantled, and the demand for those trades vanished here while it continued in Smyrna. The people did not flee. Their work left, and they followed it. B a historian’s argument, argued from evidence — not a document.

And there is a loop in it that explains the terraces as well as the leaving. Emigrants who saved bought land at home, or enlarged what they had. Combined with the island’s custom of προτίμηση — pre-emption, the right of kin and neighbours to buy first — that pushed the price of land up. Which meant some men borrowed to buy, and then had to emigrate again to pay the loan off. The island’s soil and the island’s absence were funding each other. B

The second emigration is the one that emptied the island, and it is the largest single fact of Tinian life in the last hundred and fifty years. It is also the one least written about, because leaving does not leave a monument. What it leaves is chapter xxiv’s number: 891 more people registered on this island than living on it.

The destinations, in rough order of period: Constantinople and Smyrna to 1922; Alexandria and Egypt to the 1950s; Athens and Piraeus throughout, and overwhelmingly; then, after the Second World War, the wider emigrations that took Greeks to Belgium, Germany, South Africa, Australia, the United States and — for a small number, through the schools described in chapter xxvi — to France.

What is distinctive about the Tinian version is that the ground was not sold. The instruction recorded in the fieldwork on this island is explicit: “Do whatever you can in order not to sell your land, but pass it on to the next ones.” So the terraces are still owned, in fractions, by people who live in Athens and Brussels and Johannesburg. That is why the fields look tended in some places and abandoned in others, and why so many houses are shut. The island was left, but it was not let go of.

4 · What it lives on now

Three things, and they are unusually well balanced for a Greek island.

B Foundation revenue and statutory distribution; C the artichoke figures, from a grower interviewed in the Greek press.

There is a family memory, and it is not only this family’s: that the Catholics of Tinos were protected by France, under an agreement between François I^er and Suleiman the Magnificent. The memory is wrong in every legal particular. But France is on this island — in the schools, in the language the educated spoke, in the flag its Catholics reached for in 1821, and in the most quoted sentence ever written about the place. It arrives later than the story says, and it arrives by a different door.

The claim, tested

The story runs: in 1535 François I^er concluded a treaty with Suleiman which placed the Catholics of the Ottoman east under the protection of the King of France, and this is why Catholic Tinos survived. Every clause of that sentence has a problem.

A On the disputed status of 1536 see Gilles Veinstein, Les capitulations franco-ottomanes de 1536 sont-elles encore controversables ? — the title alone tells you it is a live argument. On the protectorate, Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923 (Cambridge, 1983).

What actually protected this island — and it is a better story

The father’s instinct is sound. Something did protect the Catholics of Tinos, and it was unusual, and it lasted a century. It simply came from three places, none of them Versailles.

So the protection was real. It was a surrender clause, an absence of government, and a Roman bureaucracy — which is less romantic than a king of France and considerably more effective, since it survived every change of dynasty in Istanbul and Paris alike.

And then, once, the memory is literally true

In 1821 the Greek Revolution began, and the Catholic villages of Tinos did something that is not usually mentioned on this island and is worth stating plainly.

Why they held back is not mysterious. Under the Ottomans they had had a hundred years of being left alone, guaranteed by a surrender document. A new Orthodox Greek state was an unknown quantity, and the obvious insurance policy in 1821 was the Catholic great power. So they reached — as a community across the whole archipelago — for the protection the family story says they already had. That is, in all likelihood, where the family story comes from. The memory is not an invention. It is a memory of 1821, projected back three centuries onto François I^er.

And notice what the memory has done to the island, which is exactly what it did to the family: attached a French flag to a place that cannot be shown to have flown one.

It was closed, and closed well, in June 1823, by the five words chapter xix gives in full — «Ἄλλο Ἐθνισμός, καὶ ἄλλο θρησκεία»: nationhood is one thing, and religion another. Which settled it. Whatever the Catholic villages were in 1821, by the end of the century they were Greek, and no one has argued otherwise since. The episode should not be smoothed over — it is the one moment in five hundred years when the confessional seam described in chapter xix turned into a political fracture, and it lasted two years. But it should not be dramatised either, and an earlier draft of this book did dramatise it. The flag belongs to Syros. What Tinos has is a complaint from a tax official, and a local tradition that the two communities went down to the harbour together.

The real French presence, which is educational and much later

A Jesuit and Marist foundations, from the orders’ own records. B The Ursuline school. A de Gaulle.

That is the mechanism that actually connects this island to France, and it is worth being clear that it is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century mechanism, not a sixteenth-century one. A Catholic boy from a village under Exombourgo had, from about 1860, a route that ran: village school → the orders at Loutra or Xinara → a French-run Catholic school in Athens → French, as a second language, at a level that opened Europe. That route is why there are Tinians in Paris and Brussels and not only in Athens and Piraeus — and it is, in this family’s case, precisely the route taken. It is set out in the preface.

The sentence

One more thing, and it may be the largest French contribution of all.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort — royal botanist, professor at the Jardin du Roi, sent to the eastern Mediterranean by Louis XIV — was on Tinos in December 1700. His Relation d’un voyage du Levant is the most systematic description of the Aegean islands written before the nineteenth century, and his verdict on this one has been quoted ever since:

He also recorded the silk — sixteen thousand pounds a year — which is the single most important economic fact about Venetian Tinos, and which appears in chapter iv on his authority alone. The most influential description of this island in any language is French, and it was commissioned by a French king. Which is a form of influence, even if it is not protection.

And the other direction?

Honesty requires saying that the traffic is very unequal. France gave Tinos schools, a language, a botanist and a flag to raise in an emergency. Tinos gave France no institution, no monument, and no recorded body of settlement.

What it gave France was families — arriving one at a time, through the route described above, from about the middle of the twentieth century. There is no register of them and no association, which is itself characteristic: Tinians abroad have historically attached themselves to the Greek diaspora of the city they were in rather than forming anything Tinian.

So the balance sheet is lopsided, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The one thing this island has sent to France in any quantity is people — and this book is being written by one of the results.

Remoundos. Foskolos. Delatolas. Vidalis. Marangos. Sanoudos. On the villages under Exombourgo the surnames are Italian in shape and Greek in ending, and the natural conclusion is that these are the descendants of Venetians. For a small number of families that is true. For most of them it is not, and the real explanation is more interesting: a Latin-looking surname on Tinos is usually the fossil of a baptism, not of a migration.

Four ways to end up with an Italian-sounding Greek name

Route 2, the big one, worked through

The mechanism is dull and enormously productive. A Catholic family on Tinos baptises a son with a saint’s name in its Latin form — Raimondo. He is known in the village as the son of Raimondo. His children are known the same way. Over three or four generations the patronymic stops being a description and becomes a surname, and it is written down in a register by a priest who spells it the Italian way because Italian is what registers are kept in.

At no point in that sequence does anybody arrive from Italy.

The mechanics of the Hellenisation

The conversions are regular enough to be almost a rule, and once you see them you can read the phone book backwards.

The rule of thumb: an Italian name ending in -o takes a Greek -ος; one ending in a consonant takes -ης. Women take the genitive — a man is Σκλάβος and his wife or daughter appears in the registers as Σκλάβου, Sklavou, “of Sklavos.” This trips up anybody reading a Tinian register for the first time and assuming two different families.

Caught in the act

The dictionary that settled this family’s entry settles the machinery too, because the Hellenisation is not reconstructed — it is caught happening, in the bearers’ own hands. In 1782 a man of Agapi signs the roll «Νικολος τελετολας». His family had been Della Tolla — named for a small port south of Venice — for three centuries on this island by then; four generations of Greek mouths had worn the name to that. The same year a village elder of Mountados signs «ταπερις» for Da Peri, and a «Γιανακις ρουγγερις» signs at the Borgo for what had begun as Ruggier — old Germanic for the glorious spearman. A

Sometimes a name is caught mid-change on stone. A fountain at Pologiannis, 1814, is signed «μαστρο Τεμένεος πετράς» — master Temeneos, stonemason: the Venetian Doménego, which is Dominicus, the Lord’s own name, halfway into its Greek dress. By 1875 the family sign Δεμενεγής — and they are still cutting marble. A

And sometimes the ear does not wear a name down but re-hears it as something better — the move this family’s own name will demonstrate in chapter xxix, in Rey del mundo. Foscolo, a patrician name of Venice, is Latin Fusculus: the little dark one. In the nineteenth century Tinos began writing it Φώσκολος, pulled toward φῶς — light. The little dark one, respelled toward the light: the archdiocese’s own archivist carries the result. And Βιδάλης — the commonest surname on the island, here since 1444 — is the Venetian dress of Vitale, which also produced Βιτάλης: the man who carved this book’s lion in 2026 and the sculptors of Ysternia share one name in two spellings. A

One name was brought by nobody. Σκλάβος — the status, not the nation — attaches, in Florakis’s account, to the slaves who escaped to Venetian Tinos from the galleys of the Ottoman fleet and the pirate fuste: more than a hundred a year by 1563, officially expelled and, in the words of a Venetian report of 1577, secretly, returning, kept. Sixty-one of the name stood on the Kato Meri roll of 1875, about fifteen of them at Aetofolia. A It is the name of this family’s grandmother.

The electoral register of the δήμος of Peraia, 1875, holds them side by side: twenty-nine Ρεμοῦνδος, fifty-seven Δελατόλας, sixty-one Σκλάβος. Three names in Venetian dress, all of them Greek for centuries by then — an island’s history, filed as a list of voters.

Entries: Φλωράκης, «Ὀνομάτων ἐπίσκεψις» (2014) — Δελατόλας, Δαπέρης, Δερουγγιέρης, Δεμενεγής, Φώσκολος, Βιδάλης, Σκλάβος. Photographed from the copy bought on the island, August 2026.

One belief this does not support

There is an account held widely on Tinos, and in this family, that surnames like Kritikos — the Cretan — and Chiotis — the Chian — are the trace of refugees arriving when Chios fell in 1566, Cyprus in 1571 and Crete in 1669, and that Tinos was the Catholic refuge of the Aegean.

It is an attractive account and the evidence does not carry it. The short reason is that the documented Cretan exodus of 1669 ran the other way. It went westward, along Venice’s own lines of retreat — to Corfu, the Ionian islands, Italy, and Cargèse in Corsica. Tinos between 1669 and 1715 was a blockaded front line with decaying walls and a garrison nobody reinforced. It was somewhere to leave.

And a surname of that kind records one man, once, whom his neighbours called the Cretan. It is not a census of anything.

Tinos is not one place. Everyone on it knows this, and the vocabulary is old: there is the Exo Meri, the outer parts, and there is the Kato Meri, the lower parts. The line between them is not a mountain range or a road. It is the seam of chapter xix, and it has held for six hundred years.

The two halves

B The division is a living local usage rather than an administrative boundary — but the nineteenth-century Greek state made it administrative too, as the Δῆμος Περαίας, the municipality of Peraia, which covered the Kato Meri and which is the unit the older records count in.

Chapter xix gave the anomaly: on every other island the Franks held, Catholicism stayed a thin crust inside the castle; here it took the farmers. The Kato Meri is that anomaly, drawn on the ground. It is the part of Tinos that stayed inside the fortress’s reach and stayed Latin, and it is still, three centuries after the fortress was pulled down, a demographically distinct place with its own churches, its own feast days and its own decline.

Three villages inside two kilometres

Within that region, this family occupies a triangle you could walk across in a morning.

A ELSTAT, 2021 census, resident population.

Kato Kleisma from above

The house itself appears earlier in this book, in chapter vi, where it is doing a different job — the row of relieving arches along its left wing is one of the clearest examples on the island of the form that becomes the marble fanlight. It is worth turning back to. It is the same house.

Why the villages are where they are

None of these villages is on the sea, and that is not an accident of taste: four hundred years of raiding built the Cyclades inland, out of sight of a masthead, dark schist against the light — chapters viii and xiii carry the argument. The reason particular to the Kato Meri is the second one: these villages sit within a morning of Exombourgo.

When the alarm went, the population of the Kato Meri went up the hill and inside the walls. The fortress was not a garrison post standing apart from the island. It was the island’s upstairs room, and these villages are the downstairs.

That relationship ended in 1715, when the Ottomans took the fortress and then dismantled it. The villages remained, facing an empty hill.

A ΠΔ 19-10-1978 (ΦΕΚ 594/Δ) and ΠΔ 17-06-1988 (ΦΕΚ 504/Δ), with ΠΔ 11-05-1989 (ΦΕΚ 345/Δ).

Inside the family’s own church, and the stone that was there before it

The village church three hundred metres from the family house is the one dated 1760 in chapter vi. Its inside settles an argument this book makes at second hand everywhere else.

And the Ministry’s inventory of Tinian marble products lists «αλτάρια, βαπτιστήρια, αγιαστήρες των καθολικών εκκλησιών» — the altars, fonts and stoups of the Catholic churches — among the things these workshops made. That craft is in this building, doing its job.

Four pieces of older stone, and what can honestly be said about them

The 1760 inscription records a church already falling into ruin and rebuilt. A rebuilt church reuses stone. Four things in this building are visibly not of a piece with it.

The other lettering in the building is domestic and recent. The ambo base carries painted Greek — «ΕΙΣ ΜΝΗΜΗ[Ν] ΤΩΝ ΓΟΝΙΩΝ ΜΟΥ ΛΩΡΗΣ…», in memory of my parents, Loris… — and the high-altar frontal has raised Greek capitals, almost certainly ΧΑΙΡΕ ΜΑΡΙΑ, hidden behind the lace cloth. In sixty-seven photographs there is no other inscription: no tomb slab, no donor plaque, no date stone, and — the largest gap of all — no photograph of the bell. Bells are normally dated and founder-signed. It is the most likely second date in the building and nobody has looked at it.

In September 2022 a few pages were photographed in the Catholic library at Xinara, out of a Greek dictionary of Tinian surnames. Page 87 carries this family’s entry. It settles the etymology, it vindicates a family story that had been written off as invention, and it supplies a documented line of ancestors running back to 1597.

The entry

Rimontos, Remoundos. The surname Arimondo and Rimondo in Venice, Raimondi and Rimondi in Italy, from the baptismal name Raimondo, of Germanic origin (ragan + munda), with the original sense “divine protection”. The form Remoundos arose from the corresponding form Rachimundus, in the Frankish tradition, which passed into Spain as Reimundo and was interpreted as Rey del mundo = the king of the world, that is, Christ.

So: the name does not mean king of the world — and the family story is still true

Take the two halves separately, because they are both facts and they point in opposite directions.

The name does not come from Rex Mundi. That is settled. A Remoundos descends from the baptismal name Raimondo, and Raimondo from the Germanic ragan + munda — counsel and protection — with the original sense “divine protection”. There is no king and no world anywhere in it. The dictionary states this as the etymology and states the other thing as an interpretation, and it is right to.

And the family story is not an invention. There is a story in this family that the name means Rex Mundi, king of the world. It has the exact shape of the flattering thing families make up about themselves, and an earlier draft of this book deleted it on those grounds. That was wrong. Somebody did re-hear the name that way — not this family, and not recently. Spanish speakers did it to Reimundo centuries ago, and the philologists wrote it down.

So the honest sentence is neither the family’s nor the sceptic’s: the story is a mistake, it is a real and recorded mistake about six hundred years old, and the family inherited it rather than made it. Which is a better thing to own than a coat of arms.

The line, as the registers have it

A Ἀλέκος Ε. Φλωράκης, «Ὀνομάτων ἐπίσκεψις». Τὰ τηνιακὰ ἐπώνυμα καὶ ἡ προέλευσή τους, Ἀδελφότης τῶν Τηνίων ἐν Ἀθήναις, 2014 — first met in the Catholic library at Xinara, since bought in a Tinos bookshop; its own footnotes cite the Xinara parish registers and the published Catholic death registers. Note the spellings: Rimondo, Remondo, Remontos, Remoundos — the same family, written by whoever was holding the pen.

B The 1822 row: Γ. Ι. Δώριζας, Η Τήνος επί Τουρκοκρατίας και κατά τον Αγώνα του 1821, Μέρος Τρίτον, Athens 1978, p. 308, citing Ἀμιραλῆς, pp. 121–122, and the Hydra community archive published by Λιγνός, vol. 8, pp. 483–484.

The family against the island’s own clock

And the twentieth century

The rest of the line is in the preface, because it is a life rather than a record: a boy working the fields of the Kato Meri until he was thirteen, taken off the island in an August, taught by French brothers in Athens, military service, and then a departure at twenty-four for Cameroon — and from there a trajectory that ends in the south of France.

What the table above adds is the scale that a single life cannot supply. Between Lorenzo Remondo, chief elder of Kato Kleisma in 1618, and a boy leaving that same village for Athens, there are roughly eleven generations who did not leave.

The name means divine protection, and the family heard it as king of the world. On the evidence of the last century, the second reading was not entirely wrong.