Mesta is the fortified maze.
Diagram by Greece Trips. Free to reuse with credit - CC BY 4.0.
Walk it now and you lose your bearings within a minute, which is exactly what it was for.
The plan is the point
Most fortified villages put a wall around a settlement. Mesta made the settlement into the wall: the outermost ring of houses has no outward-facing openings to speak of, so the village presents a blank face and the defence is the architecture rather than an addition to it.
Inside, the disorientation is deliberate. It is not medieval charm that happens to be confusing - confusion was the design brief.
Olympi, nearby, keeps the same fortified plan.
Why any of this was built
Chios is the only place on earth where mastic is commercially grown. When mastic was worth more than the ground it grew on, the medieval villages of the south were laid out as fortresses against pirates and raiders.
That is the whole explanation for the southern villages, and it is why they cluster: the crop, and the need to defend it.
The other one
Pyrgi took the opposite approach to its surfaces. Where Mesta turns inward and blank, Pyrgi is scratched all over - houses covered in xysta, black-and-white geometric plasterwork carved through a dark coat to the white beneath.
Two villages, twenty minutes apart, solving different problems in the same century.
Doing it as a loop
The mastic villages sit only a short drive apart, roughly twenty minutes from one to the next, which makes them a natural half-day loop by car. Mesta, Pyrgi and Olympi are the three.
Practical notes
Chios is toured by car rather than walked from a single beach - it is one of the largest Greek islands at 842 km².
Getting there: a ferry from Piraeus six to seven days a week year-round, around eight hours direct; a short flight from Athens; or the Cesme crossing from Turkey, 20 to 30 minutes.
When: May, June and September, early September the pick. August is hot and busy.
Common questions
Can you get lost in Mesta? Comfortably, and quickly. That was the intention.
Is it still lived in? We describe the plan and the fabric rather than making claims about the current population, which our pages do not give.
Mesta or Pyrgi? Both. They are twenty minutes apart and they are opposite experiences - one blank and inward, one covered in pattern.
Next
Our Chios guide has the practicalities, things to do in Chios covers the mastic villages and Nea Moni, and the beaches cover the coast.