Thursday , March 28 2024
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Chora

The town of Chora, (as Epaminondas Stamatiadis writes in a book called “SAMIAKA”), the former capital of the island, lies to the northeast side of the plain of the country, in the plateau which starts from the old city and ends opposite the village Heraion. The part of mountain Ampelos that defines this plateau, used to be covered by infinite stout tree trunks, which at the beginning of 1800 were burned down by the locals, in order to avoid intolerable hardships and abuses that they suffered from the Turkish Government, which has forced them to cut out the trees from the mountain and carry the woods to the beach so they can be used by the Ottoman fleet. For several weeks, the country’s women used to work in the balconies of their houses “under the light of the fire burning those century-old forests”.
All homes in the country at that time were built with stones from the ruins of the ancient city. Southeast of the town stands the mountain Kastri, which reaches the Arieon end, namely the cape Kavofonias. At the foot of this mountain was the ancient city of Samos, in place of today’s village of Pythagorio.
Chora is a picturesque old village on the road junction of the mainland, at a distance of 3 km northwest from Pythagorio, on the northeast side of the homonymous valley and about 13 km southwest from the capital. By the year of 1854, it was the capital of the island.
In the area is also located the airport.
The country has about 1,500 permanent residents who mainly deal with tourism and several of them with agriculture too. Formerly, the first crop was tobacco, but after the war it declined.
You will enjoy swimming in the nearby picturesque beach of village Potokaki, with about 50 permanent residents and which during the tourist season is overwhelmed by foreign crowd and has very good tourist infrastructure.
Here you can see the Church of Agia Paraskevi and the old elementary school building.

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