The people of San Chirico are still called Griciudd, that is, Greeks, and Greek words survive in the local dialect. The town was made, around 960, by refugees from a Greek-Byzantine colony who had fled the iconoclast persecutions: they gathered around a tower the Byzantines had raised about 826 as a border outpost against the Lombards.
The name comes from Sanctus Quiricus, a three-year-old boy martyred in 304 at Tarsus before the eyes of his mother Giulitta. The Nuovo they added themselves in 1806, when they broke away from Tolve: it served to tell them apart from San Chirico Raparo and to close for good with the old name, San Chirico de Tulbis. There are 1,475 residents.
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📅 Every year, on 22 August
San Chirico Nuovo celebrates Saint Roch on 22 August, whose statue is kept in a niche above the portal of the mother church of San Nicola di Bari; the town was included in the county of Tricarico and entrusted to the Sanseverino family around 1160.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside San Chirico Nuovo, but an easy day trip away.
