Cyclades Map

The Cyclades begin just off the coast of Attica. In the north, a chain of islands continues the mountains of the Greek mainland out into the sea: Andros, the greenest and one of the largest, with springs, valleys and a long line of sea captains; Tinos, with its marble villages and the pilgrimage church of the Panagia Evangelistria; granite Mykonos, with its windmills; and tiny Delos, the mythical birthplace of Apollo and Artemis and once the religious center of the Greek world, where for a time no one was allowed to be born or to die. Nearby Syros and its neoclassical port of Ermoupoli became the busiest harbor in Greece in the 1800s, and remain the capital of the Cyclades.

Along the western edge lies a line of mineral islands: Kea, closest to Athens and the home of the poet Simonides; Kythnos, known for its hot springs; Serifos, with its iron mines and the legend of Perseus; Sifnos, whose ancient gold and silver mines paid for a famous treasury at Delphi; Kimolos, named for its chalky white earth; and volcanic Milos, whose obsidian was traded across the Aegean more than ten thousand years ago and where the Venus de Milo was found in 1820. North of Syros, the barren islet of Gyaros was used as a place of exile for political prisoners in the twentieth century.

At the center of the circle are the two marble islands. Paros gave the ancient world its finest marble, pure and translucent, and the Venus de Milo itself was carved from it; its small neighbor Antiparos hides a great cave of stalactites. Across the strait, Naxos is the largest and most fertile of the Cyclades, crowned by Mount Zas, the highest peak in the group. Naxos has the great marble doorway of an unfinished temple of Apollo, the legend of Ariadne, and a long medieval history as the seat of the Venetian Duchy of the Archipelago.

To its southeast lie the Small Cyclades: Iraklia, Schinoussa, the two Koufonisia, Donousa, and the uninhabited Keros, which may have been an Early Bronze Age sanctuary; one of the most famous Cycladic figurines, the Keros harp player, is thought to come from there. Beyond them, long and steep Amorgos has the monastery of Hozoviotissa, built into a sheer cliff above the sea.

The southern islands form the volcanic edge of the Cyclades. Ios is where tradition places the grave of Homer. Small, steep Sikinos and Folegandros have villages perched on cliffs high above the water, built there to stay out of reach of pirates. And then there is Santorini, with Thirasia across the water, the broken rim of a volcano whose enormous Bronze Age eruption left a flooded caldera and buried the town of Akrotiri under ash, preserving its houses and painted walls for more than three thousand years. East of Santorini, remote Anafi is where, in myth, Apollo lit up the sky to rescue the Argonauts in a storm. From the green valleys of Andros to the black volcanic cliffs of Santorini, few groups of islands so small hold so much geology and history, which is what first drew me to Paros and its ancient musicians.