Until the 19th century, when the first relevant records for the island of Karpathos were recorded by official bodies and historians, the works of cartographers and the texts of travelers are valuable and in many cases unique sources regarding the state of the island in recent years. Karpathos, located at the south-eastern end of the Aegean, was one of those islands that experienced little visitation from those who traveled to the Archipelago as early as the 15th century. The few who were able to visit it in those years, are impressed by the height of the mountains, by the rugged coasts and by its excellent anchorages, delivering at the same time a very strange image of its inhabitants: all their faces are stained with tar, the men choose the prospective wives with rehearsal and white fairies live among them.
From the middle of the 19th century, Karpathos will be a destination for Europeans, in which the worship of antiquities and the shift to the classical ideal coexisted with the observation of its modern inhabitants, with the productive potential of the place and with the recording of its folklore wealth. The tiny poor villages of the Carpathians on the mountains, their costumes, entertainments, songs and dances, their superstitions and superstitious practices, compose for the majority of travelers an almost utopian world, with its roots lost in the depths of the centuries.
For the first time, a book presents the course of cartographic depiction of the island, while analyzing the reasons why cartographers and travelers fell into errors and inaccuracies in the case of Karpathos.
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