Volissos Castle

The castle at Volissos stands on a hill above the village of the same name, on the northwest side of Chios, and commands a clear view of most of that coastline and its watchtowers. It was plainly the defensive hub for this part of the island. Local tradition credits its foundation to the general Belisarius in the sixth century AD, and while there is no proof of that, a fortress may well have existed there under Justinian. What is certain is that by the eleventh century a castle occupied the hill, for it appears in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene. The Genoese rebuilt it in the fifteenth century, giving it the form that survives today: a trapezoid layout with six cylindrical towers around the perimeter. The builders used a local copper-rich ore, which lends the stone a strangely dark hue. The walls and towers still stand, though they are not in good repair, and the whole remains a handsome, reasonably preserved example of Byzantine military architecture.

Heritage data from Wikidata, compiled and verified in the Atika atlas.