The settlement is built on two natural bays and it once had 15 districts and many captain’s houses. The ship owners, who constituted the upper social class of the small island, built their very impressive houses on the suburb of Kavos. The houses started to ravage some time after the French delivered Kastellorizo to the Italians, in 1921. In 1943 the German airplanes bombed the island causing great damages and the remaining residents moved to Palestine. In 1945 the fuel warehouses of the military camp that was on the island got on fire resulting in burning down 1.400 houses. Some of the expatriates that returned restored some of the houses, which constitute authentic samples of Dodecanese architecture. They are located on the pier, on so-called Kordoni. They are painted in bright colors, two-storey or three-storey, with a narrow front and a pitched tile-roof. They rarely have a yard and they are structured in levels which are distributed depending on their function. Materials such as the local stone, wood from Asia Minor, steel pipes and tiles from Antalya and Marseille were used for their construction.
Kastellorizo Architecture
