The Greek Islands: history and heritage

About The Greek Islands: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Greek Islands Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Greece has more than six thousand islands and islets, and two very different stories. In the Aegean, the Cyclades were a crossroads of the Bronze Age, then Venetian duchies and Ottoman islands of merchant captains, whose white villages were built against pirates. In the west, the Ionian Islands never fell to the Ottomans: Venice held Corfu for four centuries, and Britain after it.

At a glance

Population (Hellenic Statistical Authority, 2021 census): Corfu 99,134; Syros 21,507, whose town Ermoupoli is the capital of the Cyclades; Naxos 20,578; Santorini 15,480; Mykonos 10,704.

Two island worlds: the Aegean (the Cyclades, the Dodecanese with Rhodes, the Saronic islands and Crete) and the Ionian Sea (Corfu, Kefalonia, Zakynthos and their neighbours).

White villages built as fortresses against pirates, and a western island Venice held for four centuries.

Shaped by: the Cycladic and Minoan Bronze Age, Classical Athens, Rome and Byzantium, Venice and the Genoese, the Knights of St John (Rhodes), the Ottoman Empire, France and Britain (Ionian, 1797–1864), and modern Greece.

UNESCO World Heritage includes: Delos; the Medieval City of Rhodes; the Old Town of Corfu; Pythagoreion and the Heraion of Samos; and the monastery and Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos.

The Cycladic culture

The Cyclades take their name from the circle, kyklos, they form around Delos. In the third millennium BC their islanders carved the white marble figures, flat-faced and folded-armed, that so impressed twentieth-century artists such as Brâncuși, Modigliani and Picasso; Athens’ Museum of Cycladic Art has a superb collection.

Minoan Crete and Akrotiri

On Crete the Minoans built palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia in the second millennium BC, Europe’s first great civilisation. On Santorini, the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri was buried by a volcanic eruption around the seventeenth century BC, preserving its frescoed houses.

Delos

Tiny Delos, believed to be the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, was one of the holiest places in the Greek world, and later a great free port of the Roman age. The whole island is an archaeological site, reached by boat from Mykonos.

The Duchy of the Archipelago

After the Fourth Crusade of 1204, the Venetian Marco Sanudo founded the Duchy of the Archipelago, with its seat on Naxos, whose Kastro and Catholic cathedral still crown the town. Catholic and Orthodox communities lived side by side on islands such as Naxos, Syros and Tinos, and still do. The Knights of St John ruled Rhodes from 1309 to 1522 and built its walled medieval town. The Ottomans took most of the Aegean islands in the sixteenth century.

Built against pirates

For centuries the Aegean was plagued by pirates, and island villages, the choras, were built high up and inland, with houses forming a continuous outer wall and lanes that twist to confuse raiders. Many islands were left largely to govern themselves under the Ottomans in return for taxes, and by the late eighteenth century the captains of Hydra, Spetses and Psara, and the merchants of the Cyclades, ran great trading fleets that later joined the War of Independence of 1821. Aegina was the first capital of modern Greece, in 1828, and Ermoupoli on Syros grew into Greece’s leading port in the nineteenth century, with neoclassical mansions and a small opera house modelled on La Scala.

The Venetian Ionian

The Ionian Islands followed another path. Venice ruled Corfu from 1386 to 1797, and repulsed Ottoman sieges, most famously in 1716, when the defence led by Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg was celebrated across Europe. After Venice fell, the islands passed to France and then, from 1815 to 1864, to Britain as the United States of the Ionian Islands, before joining Greece. The Ionian Academy, founded in Corfu in 1824, was the first Greek university of modern times. Corfu’s Old Town, with its two fortresses, Venetian lanes and the arcaded Liston, laid out in the French period, is UNESCO World Heritage, and cricket is still played on the Spianada.

Our advice: pair a Cycladic island with Delos or Akrotiri to see the Bronze Age, and visit Corfu’s Old Town to feel how different the Venetian west is. On every island, climb to the chora in the evening, when the lanes built to confuse pirates are at their most beautiful.

Sources

Population: Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), 2021 Population and Housing Census. History: Hellenic Ministry of Culture; Museum of Cycladic Art; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; Corfu Museum of Asian Art and Old Fortress (Hellenic Ministry of Culture); Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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