Some twenty years ago my wife and I visited the village of Olymbos on Karpathos in the Dodekanese islands. (Locally known as Elympos.) Our guidebooks had said that it was the most Byzantine of Greek villages and in fact preserved some medieval Greek and even Doric words not used elsewhere. At that time Olymbos or Olympos was still quite off the beaten path – the beaten path from the airport at the south end of the island being possibly the worst maintained road I've ever taken. I was happy that a cab driver convinced me not to rent a car. He likely saved our lives and was himself unwilling to drive it at night. The road - which had only been pushed through the rocky and mountainous countryside a decade or so before - was on the side of a cliff, largely unpaved, and it often washed away. There are Youtube videos of it and it seems not to have improved since. En-route to Olymbos our middle aged driver tells us that everyone (every male I presume) in the villages that we passed had worked in either Germany or the USA. At twenty-two his father had picked him a fourteen year old bride. Inheritance had passed through the first daughter on Karpathos, he told us, but today a father tries to provide a house for each girl child.
Olymbos is the female form of the Mt Olympos on which it is built. (There are quite a few peaks with that name.) It is thought to have been founded by refugees fleeing Saracen pirates who regularly attacked
their villages in the 7th and 8th centuries
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The Most Byzantine Village in Greece
Vincent O'Reilly