Alliste

The name of this village, in dialect, is Caḍḍiste, and it comes from the Greek Kallístē, that is, most beautiful. Oral tradition, though, tells another story: Alliste is said to have been founded by a group of refugees who fled from Felline after the Saracens had burned it, and the name would come from the wings with which an angel wrapped them during the flight, making them invisible to the enemy. Behind the legend there are true things: the Saracen raids, frequent in these parts between the ninth and tenth centuries; the cult of the angel; and the fact that Alliste is younger than Felline, which today is its hamlet. Felline too has a name that explains itself: it would come from the Latin figlinae, the workshops where pottery was made, and indeed there was a Roman kiln there, active until the first century before Christ. The first time Alliste appears in a document is 14 September 1275, when Charles I of Anjou confirmed the hamlet to baron Guglielmo Pisanello.

The streets of the old centre cross at right angles, and that is no accident: the village did not grow by itself, but was born of a precise plan for colonising the untilled lands, carried out probably with the monks of the abbey of the Madonna dell'Alto and with Greek settlers already established in the Salento. From 1378 the hamlet becomes a Terra, that is, a place closed by walls. For centuries here people spoke and prayed in Greek: the first parish church was dedicated to Saint Sergius, and on its altar in 1618 there was still a Greek inscription. In the fifteenth century, believing themselves freed from the plague by his intercession, the people of Alliste chose Saint Quintinus as patron in place of the Byzantine Saint Sabinus; and when in 1455 the new church was inaugurated, the inscription on its front was written in two languages, Greek and the vernacular. In 1585 cardinal Alessandrini recommended to the bishop of Nardò that the Greek rite be suppressed: by then hardly anyone understood that language any more.