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Kastellorizo

Kastellorizo is a rocky island whose terrain is sharply divided into mountains, hills, plateaus, valleys, streambeds - and only one real harbour, with two smaller bays next to it. The village in which the island's people lived was very densely built.

It consisted, as Kyriakos Hondros tells us, of seven different quarters: Mouragio, Kaoulaki, (or Pountos), Chorafia, Kavos, Myli, Palamferia and Mandraki, where the boat yards was.

Inscriptions found at the castle of Ai-Nikolas, which, as we know, was built by Sosicles, son of Nicagor, refer to Amios- that is, a man of Amos on Rhodes, who served as the overseer of Castellorizo, and further inscriptions from the old castle give us the names of a number of other Rhodian overseers, Epicrates, son of Anaxicrates, Hexacesticnus, son of Lelius, Agesimachus, son of Hieron, Aeschynus, son of Diander, and Timostratus, son of Eucrates. In the second century BC, the Rhodians sent Eudamus, in command of a squadron of 36 ships, to Megiste in order to prevent Hannibal entering the Aegean. Eudamus succeeded in confining him to Pamphylia.

Among the pieces of evidence of the early Christian period on Kastellorizo are the few surviving traces of the three-aisled basilica near the church of St George 'Santrapes'.

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