TRAVELOGUE: Beneath the island calm of Kos lies a tempestuous past of massacres, forced migrations, and tales of empires lost
I sat on a beach in the Greek island of Kos, looking across the water at the hills of Turkey. It is always strange when two very different countries meet within sight of each other. But here the oddity is sharpened: these islands, the Dodecanese, lie far closer to Asia Minor (an hour’s swim out) than to the Greek mainland (an hour’s flight away). And despite the serenity, echoes of history are loud.
Kos has quite a story, and even the most derelict of locals seem proud of its ancient heritage, tied to no less than the Hippocratic Oath. This symbolic foundation of medical ethics—treat the sick with respect, do no harm, honor your teachers—was born here. Visitors are urged to see the Asklepion, Kos’s sanctuary of healing, where medicine began to separate from magic and the idea of a profession with obligations took root.
Pilgrims once came from across the Greek world to bathe in sacred springs, sleep in the temple, and wake to physicians who interpreted their dreams as part of treatment. It was a strange mix of mysticism and rational observation, but out of it grew a tradition that echoed across the centuries. The ruins of crusader castles, Roman villas, and Byzantine churches add texture, but Kos above all is remembered as the cradle of medicine. This sort of heritage inspires pride, but it does not pay the bills. Today’s tourists come mostly for the sea and sun, the bouzouki music and tavernas with their bustling kitchens.
I pondered this wandering the old town, realizing that stereotypes are often only stereotypes because they actually indeed are everywhere. Did tourist demand create the ubiquity? We’ll never know. What’s clear is that the place is packed to the gills with shopkeepers trying to lure tourists — some with oily charm, others with practiced disdain. Later in my sojourn, though, I actually found a third way.
It is only fitting. Greece has had to lean on its strengths, having endured a tumultuous two decades. When it emerged that government books had been cooked, the country spiraled into the Grexit crisis. In 2015, under Syriza, austerity was imposed to keep Greece in the Eurozone. Unemployment peaked at 27.5%. Public services were gutted. At one point, youth unemployment hit nearly 60%. Pensions were slashed, hospitals closed wards, and universities lost funding. Whole professions saw mass emigration. Slowly, the country recovered: by 2024, economic growth returned at 2.3%, and unemployment dipped below 8%. But Greece remains the EU’s most indebted state, GDP has not returned to pre-crisis levels, and many citizens face stagnant wages and underemployment. The scars of the lost decade linger.
The bartender at our hotel, Adonis, for example, related that he had a degree in business administration but that there was “not the slightest hope” to find a job in such a field outside of Athens. Athens is the bustling capital of the country, its metro area home to perhaps a third of the 10 million citizens, so why not go there, I asked. Adonis regarded me like I was crazy. “It is chaotic and dangerous,” he said. Adonis was from the number two city of Thessaloniki, which is indeed more placid, and chooses to work the season in Kos, which is of course more placid still, by a stretch. “I don’t mind,” he said, buffing wine glasses. “But I still have much to learn.” I administered cocktail tests, and can report that he’s just fine.
The problem with bartending, related Adonis, was that Greeks only attach status to doctors, lawyers, and just maybe engineers. I noted that Thessaloniki once boasted a huge community of Jews, and so perhaps there had been some cultural exchange.
Lefteris, who works at a hotel pool as lifeguard and chief of towels, seemed bleaker still. “We have nothing now here in Greece, in this economic crisis. All we have is the sea, the sun, and tourists.”
Indeed, Kos, with under 40,000 people, attracts about 1.5 million tourists a year — a disproportion that certainly puts it near the top of the leaderboard, and is basically absurd.
Upon reflection Lefteris added: “Also the people.” I was about to take my leave, but he wanted to make his answer more precise: “Some of the people!” He seemed a young man full of nuance so I was tempted to engage. “You have peace,” I said. “Think of Ukraine and Gaza and all the stuff in Africa.” Lefteris perked up at once. “I cannot think of Gaza and I cannot talk politics. If I start I want to go there and do jihad and ‘BOOM’ – explode.” I began to see his point. “It is better for you to not think about politics,” I agreed. Best to stick with towels.
Kos may be peaceful now, but it was not always thus. Looking at the map, the islands might more naturally be in Turkey. This is the view from Kos harbor, with Turkey in the background:
So how did Kos and its nearby islands end up Greece?
The answer lies in the upheavals of the 20th century. Greeks had lived in Anatolia for millennia, but after the Ottoman collapse, everything changed. With Allied support, Greece invaded Asia Minor in 1919, hoping to reclaim ancient lands. Ataturk rallied the Turks, driving them out and burning Smyrna in 1922. Tens of thousands of Greeks were killed; hundreds of thousands fled across the Aegean. Eyewitnesses described smoke that darkened the sky for days and bodies floating in the harbor. Alongside the Armenians and Assyrians, their fate has been described as genocide: whole communities erased to make way for a Turkish Republic cleansed of Christians.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne codified a population exchange: 1.5 million Greeks left Turkey; half a million Muslims left Greece. Entire villages were uprooted. Families who had spoken Turkish for generations but practiced Christianity were forced to Greece, while Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete and Macedonia were shipped the other way. The empire that had once allowed multiple religions to coexist, however unequally, was gone. In its place came the modern nation-state, with sharp borders and little tolerance for difference.
The massacres, deportations, and starvation campaigns that accompanied this transition are now increasingly described as genocide. For Armenians the label is universal; for Greeks and Assyrians, scholarship has caught up more slowly, but the logic was the same: to secure a Turkish Republic, there could be no significant Christian presence. The West, meanwhile, looked away. Britain and France needed Turkey as a buffer against Bolshevik Russia. Human rights came second to geopolitics.
And yet, something peculiar happened in the Dodecanese. In 1912, during the Italo-Turkish War, Italian forces seized Rhodes and surrounding islands. They were supposed to be returned afterward—but as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Italy decided to stay. Roads, harbors, and Fascist architecture rose. In Rhodes, monumental government buildings and schools were constructed in stripped classical style. For three decades, until 1943, the islands were ruled not from Athens or Ankara but Rome. Greek was suppressed in schools, Italian was taught, and Orthodox traditions were discouraged.
After Italy’s surrender in World War II, Germany occupied them, with brutal consequences: the Jews of Rhodes were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and only a handful survived. It was only in 1947, after the war, that the Dodecanese were formally ceded to Greece.
Why not Turkey? Geography pointed that way, but diplomacy intervened. By 1923, the Dodecanese were already under Italian control. Ataturk, weary of years of war, accepted reality: his new state needed consolidation more than new adventures. The Italians had no intention of leaving, and the great powers blessed the arrangement.
Still, the ethnic cleansing on the Turkish mainland left scars that echo here. Many island families trace their origins to Asia Minor refugees. On Kos, you can still hear stories of grandparents who fled burning villages in Anatolia – I heard them too, but never for attribution. The memory of displacement, and of survival, is part of the fabric.
The whole thing is rife with irony. The Ottoman Empire, corrupt and creaking, had nonetheless allowed a patchwork of peoples to coexist under its umbrella – at least until the Armenian Genocide. Its fall unleashed yet further violence. For more than six centuries the Empire sustained itself without nationalism, drawing legitimacy from dynasty, Islam, and conquest.
Identity was organized primarily through the millet system, which categorized subjects by religion rather than ethnicity, allowing Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Jews, and others to coexist under a single imperial framework. Far from celebrating “Turkishness,” Ottoman elites often looked outward to Persian, Arab, or European culture. What ultimately weakened this system was precisely the arrival of nationalism from Europe in the 19th century: first embraced by subject peoples in the Balkans and Caucasus, then reluctantly and destructively by the Ottomans themselves.
The Armenian genocide that began in 1915 marked the violent collapse of that older imperial pluralism. For centuries Armenians had been recognized as a Christian millet, yet against the backdrop of war and amid the Young Turks’ turn toward ethnic nationalism, they were recast as an existential threat and nearly annihilated. This was the empire’s fateful pivot: having long rejected nationalism, it now embraced it in its most exclusionary form. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded modern Turkey in 1923, he built it as a nation-state — secular, modern, and explicitly Turkish — abandoning the universalist Ottoman order. Thus, the great irony: the empire endured for centuries by resisting nationalism, but perished when it finally succumbed to it, and the republic that replaced it was constructed firmly on those nationalist foundations. And now, a century later, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan wraps itself in neo-Ottoman nostalgia, but also Turkish nationalism – seemingly oblivious to the contradiction as he bullies Greece in the Aegean, spars with Armenians, intimidates Kurds and of late dominates Syria.
Kos, meanwhile, lives in peace. The port bustles with ferries to the Turkish town of Bodrum and beyond.
Especially beguiling is the mountain village of Zia, which attracts multitudes for its serenity, knickknacks, nature park and view of the sunset.
The past feels far away — yet not. Wanting to test this, I asked locals what they thought of the complex history and of the Turks across the water. Most said they bore no animosity.
Vasilis, in his thirties, told me he had no problems with Turks — though he admitted he had never visited, despite it being minutes away. Sophia insisted that the real problems were between governments, not peoples (I wish I could say the same of Arabs and Israelis, where often it seems that the opposite may be true).
My favorite encounter came at a wonderful Old Town leather goods store named after the Vavla family that runs it: Katerina, 60, and Nikos, 62, and their children Kontessa, 20, and Tasos, 29. Amid the flood of trinkets shops this a place where they are proud of their wares. Tasos found me the belt I’d sought for months – dark gray, wide, with a matte buckle – and seemed delighted at the success.
So we all discussed the situation. Katerina is especially proud of the island’s place in history and of its pleasantness today. “We are blessed to live in Kos,” she said – and I believe she meant it. She and Nikos projected a certain energy of newlyweds, and Tasos and Kontessa plainly adored them, seemingly proud to be working in the family shop (even if none were doctors, lawyers, or even engineers).
They regaled me with family history, which includes refugees from the Turkish mainland and also a case of intermarriage with a Turkish man. As Zorba the Greek might say: “The whole catastrophe.” They were eager – especially charming Kontessa – that I should not depart thinking they felt animosity toward the Turks.
Things are of course more complex – very few people I met in Kos had even been to Turkey, which is geographically close and yet psychologically quite far.
I liked this family so much that I left the premises without realizing I hadn’t paid. Half an hour later, the oversight dawned on me. I rushed back and found Tasos in mid-sale. “Did I pay you?” I asked, panting, and genuinely unsure. “No, sir, you did not,” he said, with melancholy. “Why didn’t you say anything??” I demanded.
“I did not want to run out after you and make embarrassment,” Tasos explained. I apologized profusely and pulled out the cash. Nikos, watching, seemed astounded that I’d returned at all. “You are a good man,” he said, and I thought I saw a tear in his eye. He insisted on giving me a massive additional discount. This I accepted, because one must not refuse a heartfelt gesture.
“I have been to your country,” Nikos offered, referring to the United States. “It is very great.” I began to suspect that Nikos does not often read the news – which these days is probably just as well. They posed for a picture in front of the store.
They are blessed, I thought, in a way that I can never be. They know their place under the sun and are content with it, which proffers a serenity denied to the restless wanderer. And this place, for these generations at least, has been gentle enough. Strange to remember that only a century ago the nearby ground shook with massacres, expulsions and occupation — and that the worst of European savagery actually still lay ahead. Perhaps peace wrested from fire is treasured all the more. If
true, there is some solace there, for the sufferers of today.
