Cyclades

The Cyclades form an archipelago of islands scattered across the Aegean Sea around Delos, which the ancient Greeks regarded as their sacred centre. Most rest on a base of marble and schist, stripped bare by centuries of grazing and by the meltemi, a northerly wind that blows hard and steadily through summer and has kept tall trees from taking hold almost everywhere. Only a few sheltered valleys, notably on Naxos, the largest and most fertile island in the archipelago, escape this general dryness and carry olive trees, citrus and terraced vegetable plots. Cycladic architecture answers directly to this bare terrain and constant wind. The houses, cubic, with flat roofs or low vaults, are limewashed every year, which reflects the light and slows the heating of the walls under the sun; the lanes, deliberately narrow and often kinked, break the wind and hold shade through the hot hours. Small white chapels, funded and maintained by families rather than by the church, dot the hillsides by the dozen on some islands, each dedicated to a particular vow or memory. On Tinos, stone dovecotes, inherited from Venetian rule and decorated with pierced geometric patterns, still stand among the cultivated terraces, originally built to raise pigeons whose droppings served as fertiliser. Santorini breaks with this shared base: the island is what remains of a volcano whose collapse created a caldera, a bay ringed by black and red cliffs that drop sheer into the sea. The villages cling to the very edge of that caldera, and their white houses with blue domes, built straight into the volcanic rock, look out over an emptiness most other islands in the archipelago do not have. On the opposite, flatter side, the island keeps vines trained in low crowns directly on the black soil, a local technique that shelters the bunches from the wind without any trellis. Other islands draw their identity from their stone rather than their relief. Paros and Naxos have supplied, since antiquity, a white marble prized for its fine grain, exported as far as Athens for its most famous sculptures; on Naxos, a colossal unfinished statue, abandoned in an old quarry because it could not be moved, still stands as evidence of that trade. Mykonos, for its part, keeps a row of now-stilled windmills on a ridge above its harbour, once used to grind grain by harnessing the very wind the other islands simply endure rather than put to work. A stay in the Cyclades is almost always built around a single island, linked to the others by boat rather than by road: the rhythm is one of lanes walked on foot, terraces shaded by a trellis, and light that shifts from the blinding white of midday to the gold of evening on the stone. There is no forest or wide farmed plain to find here: most of the islands stay dry, windswept and almost bare, and it is exactly that bareness, between white stone and blue sea, that sets the Cyclades apart from any other part of Greece.