About Origins (And the Story Goes On)

Abstract

According to the oral tradition of the island there is a long gap in its habitation until modern times and toward the end of Ottoman rule, when the (natural and symbolic) ancestors of the current inhabitants took roots on it. Given the absence of historical information—which might be obtained through a systematic archival research and the support of unpublished sources—the advent of the first modern settler is vaguely set in the relatively recent past, but more specifically after the end of the Venetian-Turkish wars and the fall of Chandax.¹