The island of Alonnisos is in the Aegean Sea. This is the third island in the Northern Sporades group.
In the southern part of the island is the village of Alonnisos. It’s also called Chora and is marked as “The Old Town.” Patitiri is the name of the island’s largest port, which is in the southeast. That name is also used for a bay at the southern end of the island.
The island of Alonnisos was called Liadromia from the Middle Ages to the 1800s. In 1838, the island got a new name. The island was wrongly thought to be Halonnesus, a small Greek island. Researchers found that the Ancient Greeks called the island we now call Alonnisos Icus (or Ikos). The Colossians (the people of Knossos) lived on the island when it was called Icus. People named Phanodemus wrote about the island. It seems that Attalus and the Rhodians floated past Scyrus on their way to Icus.
A lot of the island of Alonnisos’s early past has been lost. But a story says that in the 1600s, Cretans came to the island and settled in Ikos and Skopelos to make wine. People who lived on the island of Alonnisos during the Classical time worshiped Poseidon. In the third century AD, people on the island started to accept Christianity as their religion.
After the Venetians took over Constantinople from the Turks in 1453, they would rule over the islands until 1538. During the Greek Revolution of 1821, people from all over Greece came to the island of Alonnisos to live with the natives. They now make up the population.
In 1965, a big earthquake hit the island of Alonnisos. Most of the homes in Chora were destroyed, and the people who lived there had to move to Patitiri.