Most Aegean islands fell to Greece in 1912 almost without a shot, their garrisons negligible. Chios was different. The recent Italo-Turkish War had left it unusually well prepared: a garrison of around 2,000 men under Lieutenant Colonel Zihne Bey, two battalions of the 18th Infantry Regiment, gendarmes, and artillery. The island itself was an asset to defenders — a fertile coastal plain backed by sharp, defensible mountains. With the Ottoman fleet bottled up behind the Dardanelles by Rear Admiral Pavlos Koundouriotis, the Greeks had complete command of the sea. But sea power could not climb the Aipos heights. The Greek expedition, an ad hoc regiment under Colonel Nikolaos Delagrammatikas assembled at Thessaloniki, would have to take the high ground on foot.

At 15:12 on 24 November, Greek troops began landing at Kontari, about four kilometers north of Chios town. The Ottomans fought hard at the shoreline but were driven back inland by naval bombardment, and the Greeks entered the town unopposed the next morning. Then the campaign stalled. Ottoman troops dug into Karyes and the Aipos heights; Greek attacks there failed with heavy casualties, and the Aipos position only fell to a night assault. Winter weather forced the Greeks to abandon forward positions and fall back to the lowlands. For weeks the two sides held their lines while volunteers — Chian locals, two hundred Cretans, men from Kardamyla — joined the fight. The Ministry for Naval Affairs even ordered offensive action halted. The island simply would not fall on schedule.

Reinforcements changed the arithmetic. By late December, with a fresh battalion, artillery freed up from the conquest of neighboring Lesbos, and other units arriving, the Greek force reached around 5,000 men. The Ottoman garrison, by then penned into the central mountains, sent envoys asking to evacuate to Çeşme with their arms. Delagrammatikas refused. On the appointed morning the assault opened at 07:00 — four battalions, an Evzone company, and twelve guns driving from Vrontados toward the Aipos heights, with a second thrust from the south. The heights fell by afternoon. The defenders were pushed back toward Anavatos and Pityous and found themselves nearly encircled, with no option but unconditional surrender. The last troops at Pityous gave up the following morning.

The human ledger was, by the standards of the wars that would soon follow, mercifully small: 36 Greek soldiers killed and 166 wounded, with 37 Ottoman officers and roughly 1,800 men taken prisoner. But the political settlement dragged on for years. The Ottomans refused at first to cede the islands; the Treaty of London handed the question to the Great Powers, who awarded Chios to Greece in February 1914. Even then a naval arms race and a war scare followed, defused only by the outbreak of the First World War, and the cession was not finally sealed until the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. For an island whose waters had seen Venetian, Ottoman, Russian, and French fleets, the winter of 1912 was the moment the long Ottoman chapter closed.