Mezzojuso

Mezzojuso sits at 534 meters on the lower slope of Rocca Busambra, forty-five kilometers southeast of Palermo. The Arabic Manzil Yusuf, the houses of Joseph, names a tenth-century Saracen hamlet that passed into Norman hands in 1091. In 1448 King Alfonso of Aragon granted the depopulated village to Demetrio Reres, the Albanian commander who led three battalions of Arbëreshë soldiers across the Adriatic; in 1501 their community formalised the rebuilding of the church and the use of the Byzantine Greek rite.

Today Mezzojuso is one of the Sicilian Arbëreshë communes, alongside Piana degli Albanesi and Palazzo Adriano: the language is mostly gone but the Greek rite holds. The town has two mother churches, both sixteenth-century: the Latin-rite Chiesa Maria Santissima Annunziata and the Greek-rite Chiesa di San Nicolò di Mira, with an iconostasis of sixteenth-century icons described as the most valuable in Sicily and frescoes by Olivio Sozzi from 1752. The Basilian monastery of San Basilio, restored in the 1920s, keeps a library of Greek codices and sixteenth-century editions.