Contents:
The Rough Guide to Greek Islands. Zakynthos Zante ; A Visitors Guide. Insight Guides Pocket Zakynthos. The Rough Guide to Crete. Pocket Rough Guide Athens. Greece Travel Guide - Tiki Travel.
The Rough Guide to Cyprus. Insight Guides Pocket Crete. A Long Weekend on Rhodes. Berlitz Pocket Guide Athens. Santorini and Therasia - Blue Guide Chapter. Rhodes - Blue Guide Chapter. How to write a great review. In , under Sultan Beyazit II, the Lower Castle, protected by a circular bastion at the northernmost point, was added to protect the north harbour. The interior was densely inhabited in Ottoman times; many of the ruined buildings still visible inside date from the 16th—19th centuries.
There are two entrances to the castle open daily except Mon, 8—3 , one from the south and another from the west by the Orta Kapi, m north of the New Archaeological Museum. Numbers in italics are picture references. Dates are given for all artists, architects and sculptors. Ancient names are rendered in italics, as are works of art. Page references in italics indicate illustrations. Where many pages are listed, those where. Where many pages are listed, references to those where.
Gerola, Giuseppe 36 , 36 , 39 , 47 , 54 , 54 , 96,. Blue Guide Blue Guide Crete 8th ed. Central Greece with Delphi. Paros with Antiparos and Despotiko. For example, in the Orthodox priest Pothetos of Amorgos was authorised to settle colonists on Ios, a nearly deserted island. The regular passage of pirates, of whatever origin, had another consequence: Thus, the plague descended on Milos in , and , each time for more than three months. The epidemic of claimed lives out of a total population of 4, The plague returned in , accompanied by anthrax , and killed nearly all the island's children.
Only Naxos received several Turkish families. The Cyclades had limited resources and depended on imports for their food supply. The little that was produced on the islands went, as it had since prehistory, toward an intense trade that allowed resources to be shared in common.
The wine of Santorini , the wood of Folegandros, the salt of Milos or the wheat of Sikinos circulated within the archipelago. Silkworms were raised on Andros and the raw material was spun on Tinos and Kea. Not all products were destined for the local market: The Cyclades were also the centre of a contraband wheat trade to the West.
In years with good harvests, the profits were large, but in years of poor harvests, the activity depended on the good will of the Ottoman authorities, who desired either a larger share of the wealth or career advancement by making themselves noticed in a fight against this smuggling. Thus, commercial activity retained its importance for the Cyclades. Part of this activity was linked to piracy, not including contraband.
Certain traders had specialised in the purchase of plunder and the supply of provisions. Others had developed a service economy oriented toward these pirates: At the end of the 17th century, the islands where they wintered made a living only due to their presence: Milos, Mykonos and above all Kimolos, [] which owed its Latin name, Argentieri , as much to the colour of its beaches or its mythical silver mines as to the amounts spent by the pirates. This situation brought about a differentiation between the islands themselves: During the wars that pitted Venice against the Ottoman Empire for possession of Crete , the Venetians led a great counter-attack in that allowed them to close off the Dardanelles efficiently.
Thus the Ottoman navy was unable to protect the Cyclades, which were systematically exploited by the Venetians for a dozen years. When the Ottoman navy managed to break the Venetian blockade and the Westerners were forced to retreat, the latter ravaged the islands; forests and olive groves were destroyed and all livestock was stolen. He considered the Ecumenical Patriarch as the leader of the Greeks within the Empire. Orthodoxy thus took advantage of this protection to try and reconquer the terrain lost during the Latin occupation. As the latter were absent on the islands, this function fell to the Orthodox monasteries.
Panaghia Chozoviotissa on Amorgos 11th century , Panaghia Panachrantos on Andros 10th century [] and Profitis Elias [] on Sifnos, all the rest belonging to the wave of Orthodox reconquest under Ottoman protection. These establishments are proof of a social evolution on the islands. Certainly, in general, the great Catholic families converted little by little, but this is insufficient to explain the number of new monasteries.
It must be concluded that a new Greek Orthodox elite emerged which took advantage of the weakening of society during the Ottoman conquest to acquire landed property. Their wealth was later cemented through the profits from commercial and naval enterprises. It is in this context that the Catholic counter-offensive is situated. Catholic missionaries, for instance, envisioned the start of a crusade. In vain, he used this influence to push the French king to launch a crusade.
The Cyclades had six Catholic bishoprics: They were part of the policy of a Catholic presence, for the number of parishioners did not justify so many bishops. In the middle of the 17th century, the diocese of Andros contained fifty Catholics; that of Milos, thirteen. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith , the Catholic bishops and the Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries all tried to win over the Greek Orthodox inhabitants to the Catholic faith and at the same time to impose the Tridentine Mass on the existing Catholic community, to whom it had never been introduced.
The Capuchins were members of the Mission de Paris and thus under the protection of Louis XIV, who saw in this a way of reaffirming the prestige of the Most Christian King, but also to set up commercial and diplomatic footholds. A Franciscan mission was also founded in the 16th century on Naxos, and a Dominican friary was established on Santorini in Among their proselytizing activities, the Jesuits staged plays in which Jesuit priests and members of the particular island's Catholic high society performed. These plays were performed on Naxos, but also on Paros and Santorini, for more than a century.
The subjects were religious and related to local culture: By the 18th century, most of the Catholic missions had disappeared. The Catholic missionaries had failed to achieve their objectives, except on Syros, which to this day has a strong Catholic community. On Santorini, they merely managed to maintain the number of Catholics.
On Naxos, despite a fall in the number of believers, a small Catholic core endured. Of course, Tinos, Venetian until , remained a special case, with an important Catholic presence. Thus, they too enjoyed a certain administrative autonomy, as they dealt directly with the Ottoman authorities, without passing through the Orthodox representatives of their island. In and , noteworthy Naxiot Catholics were attacked by part of the Orthodox population, led by Markos Politis. When North Africa had been definitively integrated into the Ottoman Empire, and above all when the Cyclades passed to the Kapudan Pasha, there was no longer any question of the Barbary pirates continuing their raids there.
Thus they were active in the western Mediterranean. In contrast, the Christians had been driven out of the Aegean after the Venetian defeats. As a result, they took the relay stations of the Muslim pirates in the Archipelago. In spring, they set up in the vicinity of Samos; then, at the beginning of summer, in Cypriot waters; and at the end of summer on the coast of Syria. At Samos and Cyprus, they attacked ships, while in Syria, they landed ashore and kidnapped wealthy Muslims whom they freed for ransom.
In this way they maximized their loot, which they then spent in the Cyclades, where they returned for the winter. In spring , with four frigates, they entered Ios harbour. When the Ottoman fleet, then sailing toward Crete as part of the war against Venice, tried to throw them out that 2 May, they fought it off by inflicting serious damage to it and thus made their reputation. He rapidly made his fortune and organised Christian piracy in the Cyclades. He had between twelve and fifteen ships under his direct command and had awarded his villa to twenty shipowners who benefited from his protection and transferred a portion of their earnings to him.
He kept the islands afraid of him. Their career came to a rather abrupt end: These pirates considered themselves to be corsairs , but their situation was more ambiguous. Of Livornese , Corsican or French origin, the great majority of them were Catholic and acted under the more or less unofficial protection either of a religious order the Knights of Malta or the Order of Saint Stephen of Livorno or of the Western powers that sought either to maintain or initiate a presence in the region Venice, France, Tuscany, Savoy or Genoa.
Thus they were nearly corsairs, but liable at any moment to repudiation by their secret protectors, they could become pirates once again. Jean Chardin relates thus the arrival at Mykonos of two Venetian ships in The admiral, while dropping anchor, launched flares. At the time, there were two of them. They set sail the next morning.
This attitude, also shared by the marquis de Nointel, Ambassador of France at Constantinople several years later, was a means of applying quasi-diplomatic pressure when the subject of renegotiating the capitulations came up. Certain Western traders above all those evading bankruptcy also put themselves in service of the pirates in the islands they frequented, buying their booty and providing them with equipment and supplies. There were also very close links between Catholic piracy and the Catholic missions. The Capuchins of Paros protected Creveliers and had masses said for the repose of his soul.
On numerous occasions, they also received generous alms from Corsican pirates like Angelo Maria Vitali or Giovanni Demarchi, who gave them 3, piastres to build their church. The former protected the missions from the exactions of the Turks and the progress of the Orthodox Church. The monks supplied provisions and sometimes sanctuary. At the beginning of the 18th century, the face of piracy in the Cyclades changed. The final loss by Venice of Crete diminished the Republic's interest in the region and thus its interventions.
Louis XIV also changed his attitude. Life under Ottoman domination had become difficult. With time, the advantages of Ottoman rather than Latin suzerainty vanished. When the old masters had been forgotten, the shortcomings of the new became ever clearer. The ahdname of granted administrative and fiscal liberties, as well as wide-ranging religious freedom: Greek Orthodox could build and repair their churches and above all, they had the right to ring the bells of their churches, a privilege not enjoyed by other Greek lands under Ottoman rule.
At times, some of them sent their sons to study in Western universities. These stories told of God, his warrior saints and the last Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos , who would awaken and leave the cave where angels had carried him and transformed him into marble.
These heavenly powers would lead Greek soldiers to Constantinople. In this battle, they would also be accompanied by a xanthos genos , a blond race of liberators come from the North. Russia, which was seeking a warm-water port, regularly confronted the Ottoman Empire in its attempt to access the Black Sea and through it the Mediterranean; it knew how to put these Greek legends to good use.
Thus, Catherine had named her grandson, due to succeed her, Constantine. The Cyclades took part in various important uprisings, such as that of during the Orlov Revolt , which brought about a brief passage of Catherine II's Russians through the islands. The operations took place primarily in the Peloponnese, and fighters native to the Cyclades left their islands in order to join the battle.
It then went on to spend the winter in the bay of Naoussa, in the northern part of Paros. However, hit by an epidemic, it abandoned its allies and evacuated mainland Greece in A new Russo-Turkish war that ended in the Treaty of Jassy once again saw operations in the Cyclades. Lambros Katsonis, a Greek officer in the Russian navy, operated with a Greco-Russian flotilla from the island of Kea, whence he attacked Ottoman ships.
Katsonis managed to flee with just two ships toward Milos. He had lost men; the Turks, over 3, Andros took advantage of this situation by putting in place its own merchant fleet. On the other hand, to share the fruits of this prosperity with the Turk, rather than keep everything for oneself in an independent state, was becoming less and less acceptable. For the archipelago's Catholics, the situation was fairly similar.
If revolution failed, the Turkish reprisals would be cruel, like after the passage of the Russians in the s. However, if the revolution succeeded, the prospect of living in a fundamentally Orthodox state did not please the Catholic islanders. The national insurrection was launched in March with the mythical appeal of Germanos, Metropolitan of Patras. Kapetanoi commanders, war chiefs spread the revolt across Greece, principally in the Peloponnese and in Epirus. This ambivalence explains the differences in attitude in the Archipelago at the moment of the War of Independence.
This situation was aggravated by the consequences of the war: Hence, the Cyclades took part in the conflict only sporadically. Like Hydra or Spetses, Andros, [90] Tinos [] and Anafi [] placed their fleets in the service of the national cause. The vicissitudes of conflict on the continent had their repercussions in the Cyclades. The massacres of Chios and Psara committed in July by the troops of Ibrahim Pasha led to an influx of people into the Cyclades, the survivors in effect becoming refugees there.
The ethno-religious composition of the island and its urban structure were totally transformed as a result. The Catholic island became ever more Orthodox. The Greeks using the Greek rite moved onto the coast in what would later become the very busy port of Ermoupoli , while the Latin-rite Greeks remained on the heights of the medieval city.
From the beginning of the insurrection, Milos was occupied by the Russians and the French, who wished to observe what was happening in the Peloponnese. At the end of the War of Independence, the Cyclades were given to the young Greek kingdom of Otto in However, their allocation to Greece was not automatic. The Ottoman Empire had no particular wish to keep them they had never brought it much , but France showed great interest in their acquisition in the name of protecting Catholics. The marble quarries of Paros, abandoned for several centuries, were put back into service in for a very specific order: Syros played a fundamental role in the trade, transport and economy of Greece in the latter half of the 19th century.
The island had a certain number of advantages at the end of the War of Independence. It had been protected by the relative neutrality of the Cyclades and by the French, who had taken the Catholics of Syros under their wing and thus the island as a whole. Moreover, it no longer had rivals: It was also an important industrial centre. When the Corinth Canal was inaugurated in , Syros, and the Cyclades in general, began to collapse.
The advent of steamships rendered them even less indispensable as a maritime stopover. The railroad, vector of the industrial revolution, was essentially unable to reach them, which also proved fatal. The illness that decimated silkworms during the 19th century also dealt a very heavy blow to the economy of Andros neighboring Tinos. Meanwhile, starting in this period, certain islands experienced an important rural exodus. The inhabitants of Anafi left in such great numbers for Athens during and after Otto's reign that the neighbourhood they built, in their traditional architecture, at the foot of the Acropolis still bears the name of Anafiotika.
The failure of the Cretan insurrection of brought numerous refugees to Milos, who moved, like the Peloponnesians on Syros a few years earlier, onto the coast and there created, at the foot of the old medieval village of the Frank seigneurs, a new port, that of Adamas. The total number of inhabitants rose 2. It was already suffering the effects of the Corinth Canal's opening and the development of the Piraeus. In , after the Greek defeat in Asia Minor and above all the capture, massacres and fire at Smyrna , the region's Greek population fled in makeshift crafts.
A good part of them first found refuge in the Cyclades, before being directed toward Macedonia and Thrace. The s were a period of great change for Greece. From to , , people left the countryside for Athens while another , migrated abroad.
In an overview article on the Greek economy written in the mids, the author, an American economist, cited very little data about the Cyclades. For agriculture, he noted the wine production of Santorini, but said nothing concerning the fishing industry. His chapter devoted to industry cited basketry workshops on Santorini and for Syros, activity in basketry and tannery. However, the Cyclades did appear for their mineral resources. The emery of Naxos, mined consistently since prehistory, was exploited chiefly for export.
Sifnos, Serifos, Kythnos and Milos provided iron ore. Santorini provided pozzolana volcanic ash ; Milos, sulphur; and Antiparos and Sifnos, zinc in the form of calamine.
This endogamy might take place at the level of social class, but also at that of the entire body of citizens. Economic prosperity continued despite the pirates. Kea with Gyaros and Makronisos. They came chiefly from tobacco-producing regions in northern Greece and belonged to all manner of social classes: At first they went through a period of commercial prosperity, still due to their geographic position, before the trade routes and modes of transport changed. Thus they began to pass into the orbit of Macedonia.
Syros remained one of the country's export-oriented ports. The resources of Amorgos were already being exploited in In , Greek reserves were estimated at 60 million tons. The exhaustion of iron ore on Kythnos was one of the causes of significant emigration starting in the s.