Mykonos is a Greek Island in the Cyclades. Mykonos is world famous for its tourism and lively nightlife. Many celebrities, both Greek and international, have summer homes in Mykonos, and you may sometimes see them walking the roads or dining in one of the beautiful fine restaurants. Belief has it that Mykonos was named after a local hero who is considered to be the child of the god Apollo.
Mykonos sits In the central Cyclades islands and is considered the archetypal Greek island, with sugar cube houses and blue-domed churches bathed in sunlit blue skies. Holiday visitors are joined by cruise ships attracted by the glamorous setting, the hedonistic clubs and some of the most attractive beaches to be found in the Greek islands.
Hora, the capital of Mykonos, has a beautifully whitewashed streets and fine cube homes with stepped walls and brightly colored balconies. It is a picture perfect island with all the natural beauty and serenity one might expect in Greece. The landscape is predominantly low, rocky hills and beautiful beaches. Windmills from the 16th century are a highly recognized landmark in Mykonos, as well as Little Venice, where the buildings are constructed on the seas edge with balconies that hang out over the water.
Mykonos is a legend, in more ways than one. The transformation of a dry, knotty, granitic island of dour sailors and fisherfolk into the plush Mykonos of today is the stuff of legend. Nobody could have foreseen it a century ago, or predicted that this waterless and windswept island, well-known for its harshness since Antiquity, would become a home to almost 10,000 people, with twice as many guests in addition during the summer, served by two harbours and an airport that never seem to know a moment’s pause in the season.
Then there are the other legends: the nightlife, the gay life, the beaches, the international cuisine, and the fashion parades of Europe’s jet set. It must be said that the frenzy of the 70s and 80s is largely over, and Mykonos has now settled into being a well-ordered, up-market tourist destination. Out of season it can be a delight, and only a reflex prejudice could blind one to the beauty of the Chora’s curving harbour and the houses stacked behind, as seen from the sea on arrival.
The experience of visiting Mykonos, however, is necessarily very different from that of other islands. It has become a place for those who desire their Greek island to be an extension of the city—cosmopolitan, busy, materially well-provided, a place to show off new clothes. For many temporary residents, Mykonos is a background, a pretty vessel into which to transpose the familiar routines (and problems) of prosperous suburbia—shopping, ethnic cuisine, luxury cars, searching for a parking place, and creating improbable gardens of imported exotic plants watered with imported water.
Mykonos is never dull: for the student of humanity there is ample scope for reflection. With the fading of every riotous Saturday night into the dawn of a new Sunday, as the tables are being finally cleared at some of the more colourful of the island’s bars around the church of Aghia Kyriaki, the silver-haired septuagenarian ladies of Mykonos, dressed in black, some with their wind-eroded husbands, are already gathering for a liturgy at the church in the cool of the morning. It is an encounter of two worlds, with nothing at all in common. But it continues undisturbed, and on Mykonos both worlds are felt more intensely through the proximity of the other.
The story of the island’s past is told amply in the Chora’s several excellent museums of folklore, and of maritime and rural life. The intractability of their land forced generations of islanders from Mykonos to seek an existence on the seas by trade or by piracy; the women folk who stayed on shore did most to manage the meagre agricultural productivity and animal husbandry. That there was energy and time to spare on top of this to build the 800 or so chapels and churches on the island, that seem to sprout from every rock, is remarkable. Mykonos has no tradition of wall-paintings in its churches, but the carved wooden icon screens, often coloured, within the plain interiors are a beautiful adornment. And the simple and en during logicality of the Chora’s cubic, balconied houses has been an inspiration to modern architects as diverse as Adalberto Libera and Le Corbusier.
Underneath Mykonos, according to myth, lie buried the last of the giants who had contested the Olympian gods and were finally destroyed by the rocks hurled by Hercules: the landscape is indeed granitic and boulder-strewn. Despite its infertility, man settled on Mykonos in the 5th millennium bc; settlements have been found at Ftelia in Panormos Bay, and at Kalafati. There was some continuity through the Early and Middle Cycladic periods, and the recent discovery of the tomb of a Mycenaean nobleman near Chora attests a significant Late Bronze Age presence. In historic times, according to Scylax of Caryanda, the island had two cities, Mykonos on the site of the present Chora, and (?) Panormos on the north coast. The Persian commander, Datis, stopped at Mykonos in 490 bc on his way to Greece. After the Persian Wars the island became an Athenian colony. In ancient Comedy, the figure of the ‘Μυκόνιος γείτων’ or ‘the neighbour from Mykonos’ was the typical free-loader and uninvited guest. Strabo (Geog. X, 5.9) noted that baldness was prevalent on the island so that bald men were sometimes called ‘Mykoniots’: Henry A.V. Post observed the same when he visited in 1828.
At the time that Marco Sanudo established himself as ‘Duke of Naxos ’ in 1207, Mykonos was taken by the Venetian Ghisi brothers who also held Tinos and the Sporades. The Ghisi line died out in 1390, and Tinos and Mykonos were bequeathed to Venice who put the administration of the islands up for auction in 1406, with a leased governor ship which was renewed every four years; but in 1430 this system gave way to direct rule of the ‘province of Tinos’ from Venice, with governors directly appointed for two years. In 1537 Khaireddin Barbarossa took Mykonos. The island remained an Ottoman possession for almost 300 years, apart from an interval in which it was occupied by the Russians between 1770 and 1774. During the struggle for Greek Independence, the islanders repulsed an attack by the Turks in 1822 under the inspired leadership of the heroine Mando Mavrogenous. The island was united with the newly formed Greek State in 1830, after which the traditional skills of the islanders as mariners led Mykonos to prominence as a merchant-naval centre until the advent of the new generation of steamships. The boom in tourism beginning in the 1970s meant that the town tripled in size in the space of a little over two decades.