It was clear there was no room for my luggage in the small and cluttered boot. Giannis, the taxi driver, said it wouldn’t be a problem. He bundled in the suitcase and tied the boot open with a piece of string that had turned up at just the right moment. Nor was there a problem when he stopped in the middle of the road to show me the lights of Turkey across the water. It was good to be in the Mediterranean, I thought.
For someone used to the centre, this was the edge. Chios is a few miles off the coast of Anatolia. Unlike Etna, which at the best of times is a mirage of a presence on the Maltese horizon, the coastal mountains of the mainland seem close enough to be part of the island. Many of the Turkish tourists who visit in summer are day trippers.
There’s another thing. Mediterranean islands come in two kinds. The first belong to, and are the peripheral regions of, mainland nation-states. The second and by far the rarer kind are nation-states in their own right. They are not peripheral, nor do they display the ‘isolated worlds’ character psychoanalysed by Fernand Braudel. Which is not to say the two species are not related.
By way of making conversation, I told Giannis that his island sounded like a paradise. Three times the size of Malta and with a population of just over 50,000, it would please the staunchest Malthusian. It turned out Giannis was not a true native. Originally from Athens, he had moved to Chios for love of the durable kind.
Life had been good, until the migrants arrived. Giannis told me about the two detention camps on the island. They were full of bad people who caused big problems, he said. Migrants were behind the sharp increase in crime and general mischief.
The migrants that so troubled Giannis have been trapped by politics. Like many other islands in the Aegean, Chios is normally a place migrants pass by or pass through on the way north. Then, in March 2016, a deal between Turkey and the EU effectively sealed borders and stranded thousands of people on the Greek islands.
The camps in Chios alone hold about 3,000 men, women and children. The atmosphere is charged, and there have been violent clashes with locals and the police. The view from the coffee shops that line the seafront includes both coastguard vessels and fishing boats. They are a reminder that the sea brings mixed blessings, and also that the nearest land is ruled by a man called Erdogan.
Life had been good, until the migrants arrived. Giannis told me about the two detention camps on the island
There will soon be a third contender. There are familiar-sounding plans for a yacht marina and a cruise-liner terminal. One of the reasons why migrants are bad people who cause big problems is that they tend to get in the way of tourists.
Chios is not a particularly hot tourist destination. Summer is a time of intense activity, to be sure, but the place is still generally a backwater compared to the madness of a Santorini or Mykonos.
Partly this is because the local economy has historically drawn on habits other than sun worshipping. Chios is known as ‘the mastic island’, and I can think of few products that are more romantic.
Mastic comes from a tree that is common throughout the Mediterranean and has recently increased tremendously in Malta. (Parts of Comino, for example, are full of it.) The southern part of Chios is given over to its cultivation. In summer, cuts are made to the bark and the fragrant resin that oozes out is collected and sold. Mastic is made only in Chios and, rather like Parma ham and champagne, has led to the island’s classification by the EU as a PDO (Protected Destination of Origin).
The colourful bit is that, when chewed (‘masticated’), mastic freshens the breath. It proved especially useful in the Ottoman harem, for obvious reasons.
So highly prized was mastic that when an Ottoman punitive expedition landed on Chios in 1822, it did so with orders that the mastic-producing villages be spared. Halitosis was not getting in the way of the Sultan’s pleasure.
There may be something to this link between Mediterranean islands and local specialities. Mastic is to Chios what copper is to Cyprus, salted capers to Pantelleria, and so on. By some optimistic accounts, our own islands got their name from the honey they produced.
The second reason why Chios is not particularly touristic (or touristy, thankfully) has to do with shipping. It turns out that many Greek shipping magnates come from two tiny harbours on the island. None of them live on Chios itself (London and New York are more billionaire-friendly) but some keep holiday homes there and are involved in philanthropy.
Exactly why an obscure corner of a Mediterranean island became such an exporter of enterprise is a moot point. I suppose it must be down to a first round of historical contingency, followed by several rounds of diasporic solidarity.
That, and the shipping magnates, were not the only ones to travel. The other day I noticed that an assistant at one of the shops in town had an American accent. He told me he was born in New York and that his parents were torn between making mastic in the village of Pyrgi and standard 9 to 5 jobs in Queens.
The point is that Braudel’s worlds of isolation have never quite accepted their lot. It turns out Chios is a fine place to reflect on the anxieties of certain island nation-states to the west.
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