Amongst the showcases of the historic laboratory of the School of Chios, Jules Verne would have felt perfectly comfortable. Everything would be there: the Ruhmkorff coils, the volcanic rocks, the magic lamps, the series of manometers, barometers and thermometers to record various atmospheric conditions; in other words, every piece of equipment that would be employed by his 19th-century explorers of nature. Taking this historic laboratory of Chios as our starting point and based on documents and objects related to equally important Greek educational institutions in Smyrna, Kydonies and Lesbos, we will reveal aspects of the teaching of science in the region of North Aegean from the beginning of the 19th century until the 1920s. Our historical journey will show that despite the fact that Hellenism did not participate actively in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, the European scientific spirit was introduced into the Greek world and became instrumental in the formation of the modern Greek cultural identity, thanks to the intellectual movement of the Greek Enlightenment. The Academy of Kydonies, the School of Chios and the Philological Gymnasium of Smyrna had a leading role in this process during the first decades of the 19th century. Their innovative curricula included the teaching of science, which was supported by the presence of excellent teachers, updated textbooks, scientific instruments and laboratories. Even though the outbreak of the Greek Revolution interrupted this educational process, the fame of the prerevolutionary schools and the intellectual development that had already been achieved resulted in a second period of educational growth. By the last decades of the 19th century and under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, schools and popular education institutions in the area of the North Aegean reached high European standards in the field of science education. This is related to the presence of scholars who constituted physical or intellectual links between the prerevolutionary period and the period of the late 19th and early 20th century. Through them the cause for Greek cultural identity, combined with the need to understand the modern European world, remained in the centre of intellectual and educational developments. In the cities of Asia Minor, where the land itself, full of Greek antiquities, fomented this pursuit, while the sense of progress and novelty led to significant educational achievements, the thread of Greek educational developments was permanently cut by 1922 by the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”.