A wealthy Ottoman official built this Rethymno mansion in 1820, and it stayed in his family until the fall of the Ottoman Empire forced him to leave Crete for Asia Minor in the 1920s. He sold the estate to a Greek merchant named Chobitis Iosif for 110 gold pounds, but Iosif was still ten pounds short when the deal closed.
The two men remained friends despite it, and Iosif’s descendants have kept those ten unpaid gold coins in a safety deposit box ever since, a quiet monument to the debt and the friendship both. In 2006, Iosif’s grandson decided to convert the family home into a hotel, spending six years and bringing in 70 craftsmen to restore it. The house sits in the heart of Rethymno’s Venetian old town, and one of its suites occupies the room where Chobitis Iosif once held meetings tied to Crete’s push for independence.