16 Facts About Kos

Kos or Cos is a Greek island, part of the Dodecanese island chain in the southeastern Aegean Sea.

Name Kos is first attested in the Iliad, and has been in continuous use since.

Present municipality of Kos was created in 2011 with the merger of three municipalities, which became municipal units:.

The main port and population centre on the island, Kos town, is a tourist and cultural centre, with whitewashed buildings including many hotels, restaurants and a number of nightclubs forming the town's "bar street".

In classical mythology the founder-king of Kos was Merops, hence "Meropian Kos" is included in the archaic Delian amphictyony listed in the 7th-century Homeric hymn to Delian Apollo; the island was visited by Heracles.

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Kos was said to be the birthplace of the goddess Leto; the mother of Apollo.

Kos was valued by the Ptolemies, who used it as a naval outpost to oversee the Aegean.

Kos became a center of production of unrefined silk, oars and amphorae.

Under Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies the town developed into one of the great centers in the Aegean; Josephus quotes Strabo to the effect that Mithridates I of the Bosporus was sent to Kos to fetch the gold deposited there by queen Cleopatra of Egypt.

The island of Kos featured a provincial library during the Roman period.

Bishopric of Kos was a suffragan of the metropolitan see of Rhodes.

Today the ecclesiastical metropolis of Kos remains under the direct authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, rather than the Church of Greece, and is listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see.

Kos was transferred to the Kingdom of Italy in 1912 after the Italo-Turkish War.

People of Kos are predominantly Orthodox Christians – one of the four Orthodox cathedrals in the Dodecanese is located in Kos.

The synagogue is no longer used for religious ceremonies as the Jewish community of Kos was targeted and destroyed by occupying German forces in World War II.

Ancient market place of Kos was considered one of the biggest in the ancient world.