General Information

The people on Chios live off tourism to a certain extent, but it is not their major source of income. One of the island's most important resources is mastic, from which you make chewing gum for example, and others live off fishing, farming or working on ships.

Chios is the traditional seafarer's island , especially captains, a famous song the of the Greek composer George Zambetas "to naftaki" is saying, "take to your ship an engineer from Mytilene and a captain from Chios".! When the Greek shipping had 100% Greek crews, a large part of those were mainly islanders and many of them were from the island of Chios. In the small island of Oinousses near to Chios is one of the most famous Captain schools of Greece.


There are several citations about Chios people, like the one that says wherever you find Chios men, they always go in pairs. This derives from true events during the time of the Ottoman rule when the turks were forcing the Greeks to get them on their shoulder when they met, but the Chios men they used the trick to go always together and when they saw a Turk the one of them was taking the other in his shoulder so the Turks could not force them to this humiliation.