Karpathos is the second largest of the Greek Dodecanese islands, in southeast Aegean sea. The island is located about 29.4 miles south-west of Rhodes, in that part of the Mediterranean which was called, after it, the "Carpathian Sea" (Carpathium Mare).

Art and Culture

Karpathos is very conservative, both in attitude and culturally. This entails that many arts lost in the rest of Greece, or only shown as part of the usual folklore exhibitions, are alive and well on the island.
The major art forms are music and poetry or a combination of both called mantinades. A mantinada consists of a poem formed with 15-syllable verses to form rhyming couplets. Ethnologists also claim that a simple form of dance called pano horo is an original Karpathian variation of the Sirtos. (The traditional musical instruments are lauto (lute), lyra (lyre) and tsambouni (a primitive version of the bagpipe) as on other Dodecanese Islands in different combinations.