Faskyu is the Arabic name of the Greek island of Ithaca (Greek Ithake), in the Ionian Sea west of mainland Greece, northeast of Cephalonia (Kephallenia) and south of Leukas. It is called: in Latin, Ithaci/Ithaki, in Byzantium’s commercial concessions to Venice; in Italian, Val de Compar[e]; in Old French, Theachi ( Chronicle of the Morea, ed. Jean Lognon, Livre de la conqueste de la princée de l’Amorée, Paris 1911, § 239); in Turkish, Siyaki, and variants in Soustal and Koder, 168–9, and Kordoses, Ithake, 42–6, 262–6 (with topographical observations). Ithake was made part of t…

Athos (Gr. Hagion Oros, “Holy Mountain”; Turk. Aynaroz or Aynoros) is a mountain on the peninsula of the same name, which is the most easterly of three long peninsulas that extend into the Aegean Sea from the larger peninsula of Chalcidice, in Macedonia. Between the ninth/fifteenth and fourteenth/twentieth centuries, Athos flourished as the main centre of an Eastern Orthodox monastic community that included more than twenty major monasteries and their dependencies (see Talbot and Kazhdan, Athos, 224–6; Le millénaire, 2:344–483). In 1541, when the monastery of Stavroniketa…

Bozcaada (Gk. Tenedos), the former Leycophrys, is a 39 square-kilometre Turkish island in the northeast Aegean Sea, just off the west coast of Turkey, about 19 kilometres (12 miles) south of the strait of Çanakkale. It is referred to as “the key to the Dardanelles” because of its strategic location. According to the legend of the Trojan War, Tenedos was the spot where the Greeks hid their fleet after leaving the wooden horse in front of the gates of Troy and before sacking the city. During the fourteenth century, Genoa and Venice competed for control of Tenedos. In 1352, the Byz…