The village was born Byzantine and still says so: the layout of its streets, a Basilian crypt cut into the tufa beside the chapel of San Rocco, where traces of an iconostasis survived, and the Greek surnames the inhabitants still carry. The dialect too keeps words that came from there, such as capasa, the terracotta jar. Under the houses lay the trappeti, oil mills hollowed out of the rock: in the nineteen-thirties there were five of them, today two survive almost intact. All around are the olive groves of the Paduli Park, with trunks two and a half metres across.
Reliable records begin in 1190, when Tancred of Hauteville gave the fief to Gabriele Guarino to reward the knights who had served his forebear, Count Robert: the same family held it without a break until 1806. The hearth count tells the rest. In 1447 the village was taxed for seventeen households; in 1483 for five. In between came the Turkish invasion of Otranto in 1480, and that collapsed figure is the driest way a census can describe a devastation.
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📅 Every year, from 14 to 17 August
From 14 to 17 August Surano, a municipality of 1,698 inhabitants in the province of Lecce, celebrates its Patron Saints: the martyrs of Otranto, Maria Assunta and San Rocco.
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 Surano, but an easy day trip away.
