mastic

Chios, Greece, an island in the north-east Aegean 3.5 km off the coast of Asia Minor; resin bled from the mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus var. chia, and extracted only in the mastic villages of the island's south; shrubs of the same genus grow across the island and the whole Mediterranean, yet every attempt to produce mastiha anywhere else has failed; the resin flows from cuts in the bark as a tear and dries on the ground in about fifteen days

From 1346 the Genoese company of the Maona ruled Chios, fixing how much mastic could be produced and burning or storing any surplus to hold the price, and dividing each harvest among four ministers for the Greek lands, the West, Asia Minor, and Syria, Egypt and Barbary; from 1566 an Ottoman monopoly, shipped in crates under the sultan's seal, the best of it to Constantinople and the rest as far as India and Italy; chewed across the Ottoman world from Izmir to Cairo, while Europe bought it for varnish until new chemistry displaced it at the end of the nineteenth century and its price fell to a hundredth; since 1938 the whole crop has been gathered by the growers' own association, and since 1997 it has been a protected designation of origin

Mastic grows in one place and is harvested by scoring the bark twice a week through the summer and waiting for it to weep, which produces a supply valuable enough for the island's rulers to police. Under Genoese and Ottoman rule the mastic villages were governed as an asset, the crop held under central control while the growers kept certain privileges of their own: the Genoese kept thirty-eight small ships to chase smugglers, and the Ottomans gave the villages to the Valide Sultana and set over them an aga of the mastic in whose work, by a decree of 1755, nobody had the right to intervene. Each village owed its tax in mastic, the tax-farmer kept a summary of every grower's trees, and a grower with a poor harvest borrowed at high interest against the next one; one who still could not pay would uproot his own trees rather than work without pay. The Genoese fortified the villages on sites hard to spot and far from the sea, to control the production and movement of the resin against pirates and smugglers, and most of them, still inhabited, keep that character; at Carnival the villages still stage the Aga, the Ottoman collector of mastic. It reads as a small luxury resin now, chewed and stirred into ice cream, but the reason those villages exist in the shape they do is that something in them was worth guarding.