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Besides olive groves, the gently rolling countryside in the south of the island is also home to the mastic bush ( Pistacia lentisca ), found across much of Aegean Greece but only here producing an aromatic resin of any quality or quantity. For centuries it was used as a base for paints, cosmetics and the chewable jelly beans, which became a somewhat addictive staple in the Ottoman harems. Indeed, the interruption of the flow of mastic from Hios to Istanbul by the revolt of spring 1822 was one of the root causes of the brutal Ottoman reaction. The wealth engendered by the mastic trade supported twenty mastihohoria (mastic villages) from the time the Genoese set up a monopoly in the substance during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the end of imperial Turkey and the development of petroleum-based products knocked the bottom out of the mastic market. Now it's just a curiosity, to be chewed - try the sweetened Elmabrand gum - or drunk as a liqueur called mastiha , though it has had medicinal applications since ancient times. These days, however, the mastihohoria live mainly off their tangerines, apricots and olives. The towns themselves, the only settlements on Hios spared by the Ottomans in 1822, are architecturally unique, laid out by the Genoese but retaining a distinct Middle Eastern feel. The basic plan consists of a rectangular warren of tall houses, with the outer row doubling as the town's perimeter fortification, and breached by a limited number of arched gateways
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