Pallagorio

Pallagorio is an Arbëreshë village: it keeps the language, the customs and the traditions, though no longer the Byzantine-Greek rite, which was used here alongside the Roman one until the middle of the seventeenth century. The Albanians came about the middle of the fifteenth century — Albanian and Greek mercenaries from Epirus and the Peloponnese, led by Demetrio Reres, who settled here after fighting in the war between Angevins and Aragonese. But the name they found was Greek and much older: Palaios Chorion, the old village. Greek too are the names of the fields all around — Patamò, Coracciti, Coniselle, Scea, Gardea, Coraco, Cona — and at the entrance to the village there is still a place called Porta Scea. In the Middle Ages the settlement, gathered in the districts of Valle and Cucinaro, was called San Giovanni in Palagorio, had a few hundred inhabitants, nearly all farmers, and depended on the lords of Umbriatico; it became a comune of its own in 1834.

Some local historians hold that the Italic-Hellenic city of Chone stood in the territory of the village: the city that ancient tradition has founded by the Greek hero Philoctetes and that Strabo, Lycophron, Apollodorus, Antiochus of Syracuse and Stephanus of Byzantium name. What is certain is that in the second millennium before Christ the Oenotrian-Italic people of the Choni were here, and that the contrade around the village still carry their name: Tre fontane di Cona, Terra di Cona, Serre di Cona, Conicella, Coniselle. In the first of those, exactly in the area Strabo describes, the remains of an ancient necropolis have come to light with votive statuettes and metal diadems referable to the Orphic cult. And the caves of the contrada Coracciti-Piperia were used in classical times for Mithraic cults, and then, in the early Middle Ages, as ascetic refuges by the Basilian monks.