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Kastellorizo 's official name, Meyisti (biggest), seems more an act of defiance than a statement of fact. While the largest of a tiny group of islands, it is actually the smallest of the Dodecanese, over seventy nautical miles from its nearest Greek neighbour (Rhodes) but barely more than a nautical mile off the Turkish coast at the narrowest straits. At night its lights are quite outnumbered by those of the Turkish town of Kas¸, which lies across the bay and with whom Kastellorizo generally has excellent relations. Until the early 1900s there were almost 14,000 people here, supported by a fleet of schooners that transported goods, mostly timber, from the Greek towns of Kalamaki (now Kalkan) and Andifelos (Kas¸) on the Anatolian mainland opposite. But the withdrawal of island autonomy after the 1908 "Young Turk" revolution, the Italian seizure of the other Dodecanese in 1912 and an inconclusive 1913-1915 revolt against the Turks sent the island into decline. A French occupation of 1915-21 prompted destructive shelling from the Ottoman-held mainland, a harbinger of worse to come. Shipowners failed to modernize their fleets upon the advent of steam power, preferring to sell ships to the British for the Dardanelles campaign, and the new frontier between the island and republican Turkey, combined with the expulsion of all Anatolian Greeks in 1923, deprived any remaining vessels of their trade. During the 1930s the island enjoyed a brief renaissance when it became a major stopover point for French and Italian seaplanes, but events at the close of World War II put an end to any hopes of the island's continued viability. When Italy capitulated to the Allies in the autumn of 1943, a few hundred Commonwealth commandos occupied Kastellorizo, departing of their own accord in spring 1944 - leaving the island deserted and vulnerable to the attentions of pirates. In early July, a harbour fuel dump caught (or was set on) fire and an adjacent arsenal exploded, taking with it more than half of the two thousand houses on Kastellorizo. Even before these events most of the population had left for Rhodes, Athens, Australia (especially Perth) and North America. Today there are just 342 official residents here by the last census (with only 250 actually living permanently on Kastellorizo), largely maintained by remittances from over 30,000 emigrants and by subsidies from the Greek government, which fears that the island will revert to Turkey should their numbers diminish any further. Yet Kastellorizo has a future of sorts, thanks to expat "Kassies" who have begun renovating their crumbling ancestral houses as retirement or holiday homes. Each summer, the population is swelled by returnees of Kassie ancestry. Occasionally they celebrate traditional weddings in the Ayios Konstandinos cathedral at Horafia, which incorporates ancient columns from Patara in Asia Minor. Access has also improved since the late 1980s: an airport (domestic flights only) was completed, and the harbour dredged to accommodate larger ferries, though the island has yet to be designated an official port of entry to Greece, which causes problems for both yachties and conventional travellers crossing from Turkey. You will either love Kastellorizo and stay a week, or crave escape after a day; its detractors dismiss the island as a human zoo maintained by the Greek government for the edification of nationalists, while partisans celebrate an atmospheric, barely commercialized outpost of Hellenism
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