Municipal Library "N.G. Mavri"«

Inside an imposing neoclassical building in Fry, the Municipal Library of Kasos is housed, a tribute to the man who laid its foundations: Nikolaos G. Mavris, the first Governor-General of the Dodecanese after their unification with Greece. Behind its shelves lies the story of a man who dedicated his life to the study and preservation of the Dodecanese heritage.

The Municipal Library of Kasos is housed in an imposing neoclassical building in Fry and was founded thanks to a donation from the family of Nikolaos Mavris, the first Governor-General of the Dodecanese and a former member of parliament for the island group. Its archive includes approximately 4,000 titles, covering history, literature and reference works, while its hall also functions as a venue for cultural events throughout the year — making the library more than just a simple repository of books, a true spiritual core of the island.

The name that the library bears is not a random honorary attribute, but reflects a real, deep relationship of Nikolaos Mavris himself with the institution. From a very young age, he was systematically involved in the local bibliography and folklore of the Dodecanese, founded in 1928 the Association of Kassians in Greece and, in 1936, the Society of Dodecanese Studies. In 1948, after the union of the Dodecanese with Greece, he took up the position of the first Political Governor-General of the Dodecanese, a position from which he resigned in 1950 to run in the first parliamentary elections. It was precisely during this first administration of his that the Library and Historical Archives of Kasos were founded — institutions that he himself considered an integral part of the reconstruction of the island complex after its integration into the Greek state.

A life dedicated to the Dodecanese

Nikolaos Mavris was elected MP for the Dodecanese in 1951 with the "Hellenic Alarm" of Alexandros Papagos, and shortly afterwards, from December 1952 to April 1954, he served for a second time as Governor-General of the Dodecanese. After the end of his second term, he settled in Athens, but never stopped working on the Dodecanese: he founded the Kassions Association there and continued to donate books to the library of his island. He also served as president of the Dodecanese Historical and Folklore Society and published the monumental two-volume work "Dodecanese Bibliography" — a reference work not only for the Dodecanese, but for the entire Greek bibliographical research, with a third volume remaining unpublished to this day. Fry's library thus remains a living monument to this long-standing, personal dedication of a man to the knowledge and history of his place.