Daily Mail anthem for Ikaria’s anti-piracy houses – ‘Invisible’ from corsairs

THE Ikariaa beloved island and popular destination for its beaches and festivals, has also become famous for the longevity of its residents.

But the legends that exist in the mountains and its valleys are something that not many people know.

The British newspaper Daily Mail in its extensive publication praises the anti-piracy houses which are built under rocks and cannot be distinguished from anywhere unless you stand in front of them.

Historical records state that the piracy plagued Ikaria and other Aegean islands from the 1st century BC, but things got worse over time.

The island was raided under both Roman and Byzantine rule, while in the 14th century, after the island became part of the Republic of Genoa, piracy became so rampant that the locals destroyed their harbors to prevent raids. But that wasn’t enough.

After the incorporation of Ikaria into the Ottoman Empire the people of Ikaria decided to take action. The relaxed rule of the Ottomans only encouraged pirates to attack and raid islands like Ikaria and the locals had little choice to deal with the situation.

So they destroyed their harbors and went up into the mountains building houses under rocks

As stated by Daily Mail in her tribute to the famous “pirate houses” these are “centuries-old dwellings built under boulders to camouflage themselves in the landscape so that they could not be detected by the pirates from the Aegean Sea.

The idea behind the design of these houses was to trick the pirates and to think that the island was completely uninhabited. Over the years the design proved durable and many of these fascinating one-story houses – located far from the coast, hidden in the mountains – remain today.

As an added security measure, they had no chimneys so that rising fumes of smoke could not betray their locations.

In order not to draw attention to their presence on the island, the Ikariotes they were not circulating on the island during the day, but only during the night. The islanders also destroyed their harbors to prevent pirates from docking.

The tourist office explains to the Daily Mail: “Each house had its own farm with crops and was set apart from the other houses and together they created ‘neighborhoods’.”

Some houses were built during Byzantine rule (395 AD to 1453), but the population retreated more en masse to these “secret settlements” in the mountains in the early 16th century, when the island came under Ottoman control.

The Icarians continued to build and live in anti-piracy houses for about three decades, a period popularly known as the “pirate age” or “pirate age”.

So, when you are back on the island, observe these famous houses and travel through their distant history…