Nisiros

History

According to myth, Poseidon tore a piece off neighbouring Kos and hurled it onto the giant Polybotes to trap him beneath the sea, forming Nisyros — anciently known as Porphyris and mentioned by Homer in the Iliad. Fifth-century BC walls survive on the acropolis above Mandraki, and millstones quarried on the island were traded across the Aegean in antiquity. Genoese captains held Nisyros in the 10th-11th centuries before the Knights Hospitaller settled it under lease in 1315 and built the castle overlooking Mandraki. Ottoman rule ran from 1566 until the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese in 1912, and the islands were united with Greece in 1948 following the 1947 Treaty of Paris. The population has fallen sharply since a mid-20th-century peak of 2,516 in 1950 to 1,048 at the 2021 census, as islanders left for work elsewhere.