Chios Central Square Live Cam

The central square of Chios town is a long paved space between the town hall and an old Ottoman mosque. The camera looks east across it in the direction of the port.

The island has a monopoly nobody has broken: mastic, a resin tapped from bushes that give it up nowhere else. The villages that grow it in the south of Chios were built as fortified blocks in the Middle Ages to protect the crop, and the practice is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list.

The mosque on the square now holds the Byzantine museum. Chios came to Greece in 1912, ninety years after an Ottoman reprisal that killed or enslaved most of the island's population and became known across Europe through a painting by Delacroix.