Mesta, the village that is a castle

For centuries the south of Chios had one treasure that grew nowhere else in the world: mastic, the fragrant resin of the lentisk tree, prized from Constantinople to Venice as a medicine, a perfume and the first chewing gum. Whoever ruled the island guarded it closely, and the twenty or so villages that produced it, the mastichochoria, were built to protect both the harvest and the people who gathered it.

Mesta is the most complete of them. Its origins are Byzantine, and it was fortified under the Genoese, who held Chios from 1346 to 1566 and ran the mastic trade as a monopoly. The village was planned as a single fortress: the outer houses stand back to back to form a continuous wall with no doors to the outside, there were only a few gates, and in the middle rose a tall tower where everyone could shelter as a last refuge. The flat roofs connect, so the villagers could move across the whole village without going down into the lanes.

Under the Ottomans, who took the island in 1566, the mastic villages kept special privileges, because the sultan's harem wanted their mastic. In the massacre of 1822, when much of Chios was destroyed, they were largely spared for the same reason. That is why Mesta still looks so much as it did five centuries ago, its stone lanes barely wide enough for a loaded donkey.

Today the tower is gone, but the plan of the village is intact, and inside the walls you will find the old church of the Palaios Taxiarchis and the great 19th-century church of the Megas Taxiarchis, one of the largest on the island, with its carved wooden iconostasis. In late summer the farmers still go out to the groves to scrape the trees and gather the mastic tears from the white ground beneath them.