Daily Mail: “anti-pirate” houses of Ikaria among the rocks

“These invisible houses built under giant boulders that protected the inhabitants of Ikaria from pirates,” writes the Daily Mail in a hymn to the ingenuity and resilience of the inhabitants of this Greek island.

The “anti-pirate” houses on the Greek island of Ikaria, dwellings where the inhabitants of the island hid from enemies and pirates, were built under boulders to camouflage themselves in the landscape so that they would not be noticed from ships sailing in the Aegean Sea. Thus begins a Daily Mail article praising the ingenuity and resilience of the Icarians. Described as a “unique survival system”, the idea was to fool the pirates into thinking the island was completely uninhabited. Proof that this was an effective plan, many of these charming houses, located far from the coast, hidden in the mountains, have survived to this day.

Age of obscurity
The Daily Mail writes: “Every house had a garden and vegetable garden where food was grown. They stood at a distance from each other, and together they formed a kind of secret “quarters”.

The problem of piracy in Ikaria began in the 1st century BC. The locals for centuries have never had enough resources to properly defend themselves, partly because the islands have passed from one ruler to another, from the Romans to the Byzantines to the Knights of St. John.

Some “anti-piracy” houses were built during the Byzantine rule (from 395 AD to 1453), but when the island came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the early 16th century, the population completely retreated to these “secret settlements” in the mountains , “leaving this world.”

This period on the island became known as the “age of obscurity” (from 1521 to 1601).

Today, the ruins of these settlements can be visited in various parts of the island, although the abandoned mountain village of Lagada in the west is a particularly important site for the islanders. “This green valley, almost completely hidden from prying eyes, was once a sacred place that allowed the Icarians to survive during a century of obscurity,” say the inhabitants of the island about this village.

Every summer, a festival is held in the valley with performances dedicated to the “original struggle of the Icarians for survival.”

Source link