3-070-932 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Castro, Island of Chios, destroyed by the Great Earthquake, 1881. 'The most terrible disaster of this kind in recent times, causing the destruction of several thousand human lives, befell the small island of Chios, or Scio, in the Grecian Archipelago...A correspondent of the Times, who has visited Chios, says that such u picture of desolation he had rarely witnessed. "The town looks as if it had been subjected to a terrible bombardment; hundreds of houses have been transformed into a shapeless mass of ruins, under which lie buried an unknown number of victims... An account sent by telegraph last Monday states that, of three thousand houses in the town of Castro, not one hundred are now left in a habitable condition. The whole surviving population of the town is camped out in gardens and fields. Some are sheltered in tents and sheds, but others have to lie in the open air with no kind of shelter. A Relief Committee is distributing food to the destitute, and field ovens have been erected for baking bread...There is great difficulty in sending help to the villagers whose houses have been destroyed, owing to want of communication; but there are numerous relief committees at work in the island, though the confusion is indescribable'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881