The Greeks called it Moschonisi, the fragrant island, the largest of an archipelago they named Hekatonisa after the goddess Hekate. Settlement here reaches back into antiquity, to places the old sources call Nasos, Pordoselene, and Chalkis. Pausanias, the ancient travel writer, recorded a story from Poroselene bay in the island's north: a dolphin that had once saved a drowning boy and lived on among the people who remembered it. For most of recorded time this was a Greek island, prosperous and devout, its harbors busy and its hillsides terraced, a world that felt as permanent as the rock it stood on.

What happened to that world was deliberate and devastating, and it must be told plainly. In 1913, an Ottoman official proposed settling wealthy Muslim migrants on the island to dilute its Greek majority. Persecution began in 1914. The bishop Photios and other leading men were seized, beaten, and locked in a mill. Islanders were deported to the mainland, forbidden to take their belongings, then scattered among distant villages where many died. On September 19, 1922, several hundred of the remaining Greek islanders were killed; only some children were spared, sent to orphanages. The island's churches were looted and turned into stables. These were not statistics. They were families with names, a community erased within a decade.

After the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the last Greek islanders were forced to leave for a Greece most had never seen. Into their emptied houses came Cretan Turks and Muslims expelled from nearby Lesbos, people who had themselves been torn from their own homelands by the same treaty. There is no triumph in this arrival, only another displacement layered onto the first. The newcomers inherited a beautiful island and a heavy silence, and the descendants of those who came have spent recent decades learning, and increasingly honoring, the story of those who left.

The island's great landmark is the Taxiarchis Church, the Metropolitan cathedral the Moschonisi Greek Orthodox congregation built in 1873, dedicated to the archangels. Converted to a mosque in 1927 and shattered by a 1944 earthquake, it stood abandoned for decades. Then the Rahmi M. Koç Foundation leased and restored it, opening it as a museum on May 31, 2014. Other relics fared worse: the Greek monastery of Saint Demetrius, raised in 1766 with islanders' donations, was destroyed by treasure hunters in 2020. That a Turkish institution chose to rescue a Greek cathedral, while looters tore down a Greek monastery, captures the island's unfinished reckoning with its own past.

Reach Cunda now and it feels like the platonic Aegean resort: cats dozing in alleys, windmills bright against the blue, restaurants spilling onto the waterfront. A bridge and a late-1960s causeway tie the island to the mainland through Lale Island, the first such crossing of a strait ever built in Turkey and still standing. Scholars come too. Harvard and Koç universities have run an intensive Ottoman and Turkish summer school here. Cunda's beauty is real and worth the journey, but the richest way to see it is with both eyes open, to the light on the water and to the people who once called this fragrant island home.