Gerace historical timeline

Gerace exists because a Greek city on the coast became unsafe.

From Locri

Locri Epizefiri, founded on the shore around 680 BC, was one of the significant cities of Magna Graecia — the first in the Greek world to be given a written law code, by Zaleucus. As Roman and then Byzantine authority weakened and Saracen raiding increased, the coast became untenable, and from roughly the seventh to ninth centuries the population moved inland and uphill. Gerace is where they stopped.

The name is traditionally derived from the Greek for a hawk, with a story about a bird leading the refugees to the site. It is a good story and it is not evidence.

Byzantine and Norman

The town was Byzantine, Greek-rite and Greek-speaking for centuries, and kept a Greek liturgy long after the Normans arrived in the eleventh century. The Normans made it a bishopric and built the cathedral, consecrated around 1045, on a scale that reflects the diocese rather than the town.

Decline

Gerace was fought over by Angevins and Aragonese, damaged repeatedly by earthquake — the 1783 Calabrian sequence was severe here — and slowly lost its administrative importance.

A hundred churches

Gerace is said to have had well over a hundred churches at its height, and the claim, while inflated in the telling, points at something real: a bishopric, several monastic orders and a set of competing noble families all building in one small town. A couple of dozen survive in some form, many deconsecrated or ruined.

The emptying

Since the late nineteenth century the town has lost most of its population to emigration, first to the Americas and then to northern Italy. That, and not any single catastrophe, is why a town built for many thousands now holds a fraction of them.