What Is Kastellorizo Known For?

Kastellorizo sits closer to Turkey than to any other Greek island, and that remote position at the easternmost edge of Greece has shaped nearly everything about its history.

Kastellorizo is known first for the Castello Rosso, the Red Castle built by the Knights of St. John in the 14th century on the reddish rock overlooking the harbor, a structure that gave the island its modern name. Officially called Megisti since antiquity, the island passed through Dorian, Rhodian, Byzantine, French, and Italian control over the centuries before formally joining Greece in 1948.

The island is equally known internationally for Mediterraneo, the 1991 Italian film by director Gabriele Salvatores, shot entirely on Kastellorizo and awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. The film tells the story of Italian soldiers effectively forgotten by their command on a remote Aegean island during the Second World War, a plot that carries real weight given what actually happened to Kastellorizo during that same period. On September 13, 1943, the island became the first piece of Greek territory liberated during the war, but its population was soon evacuated for safety, first to the opposite coast and later to a refugee camp in Gaza. A fire in 1944 then destroyed roughly half the island's houses, and Kastellorizo, once home to well over ten thousand residents, has never fully recovered that population, with fewer than 600 permanent residents recorded in the most recent census.

Kastellorizo is also known for the Blue Cave, a sea grotto reachable only by boat, and its position just two kilometers from the Turkish coast makes it both the easternmost inhabited point in Greece and the European Union, connecting today by ferry and short flight through Rhodes.