🇬🇷 Greece · Cyclades
Paros is, for many, the island that best sums up the charm of the Cyclades without going to extremes. It does not have the runaway, very expensive glamour of Mykonos or the vertigo of Santorini, but nor is it a sleepy destination: it is a vibrant, balanced island, with postcard white villages, some of the best beaches in the Aegean, world-class wind sports, good food and a lively but relaxed nightlife. A place where the picturesque, the active and the peaceful live together in harmony.
Its two main faces are Parikia and Naoussa. Parikia, the capital and port, mixes the bustle of its shopping lanes with the Byzantine jewel of the Panagia Ekatontapiliani, the 'Church of a Hundred Doors', one of the most important early Christian churches in Greece. Naoussa, in the north, is an old fishing village turned into the chic heart of the island: its little Venetian harbour, its fish tavernas over the water and its fashionable bars fill it with charm by day and life by night. And everywhere beats the legacy of Paros marble, the purest and most translucent of antiquity, from which the Venus de Milo herself was carved.
This guide covers Paros with a practical, warm eye: what to see in Parikia and Naoussa, how to reach the beautiful mountain village of Lefkes, which beaches to choose depending on whether you want calm or wind (from quiet Kolymbithres to the windsurfing mecca of Golden Beach), how to hop to neighbouring Antiparos and its famous cave, where to eat well and how to get around the island. Because Paros rewards the traveller who wants a bit of everything: history, beach, sport, good food and that unmistakable Cycladic air, at a friendlier price than its more famous neighbours.
Paros owes its thousand-year fame to a stone: its white marble (lychnites), the purest, finest and most translucent of antiquity, used to carve masterpieces such as the Venus de Milo, the Nike of Delos and part of the treasures of the Acropolis. Inhabited since the Neolithic and a centre of Cycladic culture, in the archaic period it was a prosperous power that founded colonies such as Thasos and gave the world Archilochus (7th century BC), one of the first great Greek lyric poets and the father of iambic verse. From Paros also comes the Parian Chronicle (the Marmor Parium), a famous marble inscription recording the chronology of Greek history. In 490 BC, for having supported the Persians, the island was besieged unsuccessfully by the Athenian general Miltiades. After passing through Athens, Rome and Byzantium, in 1207 it joined the Venetian Duchy of Naxos, and in 1537 it fell under Ottoman rule until Greek independence in 1821–1830. Tourism discovered it in the 20th century, making it one of the best-loved islands in the Aegean. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The white archipelago of the Aegean: cradle of the enigmatic Bronze Age Cycladic culture, with the sacred island of Delos where Apollo was born, the Santorini split apart by the greatest eruption of antiquity and the centuries of Venetian rule in the Duchy of Naxos.
Read the history of Cyclades →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The whole history of Paros turns, at bottom, around a stone. Because this island in the central Cyclades gave the ancient world what was considered, for more than a thousand years, the finest marble ever quarried: Paros marble, and in particular its noblest variety, lychnites. It was a white marble of almost absolute purity, of very fine grain and astonishing translucency: light penetrated a few millimetres into its surface, giving sculptures carved from it a warmth and a softness that was almost like flesh, impossible to achieve with other stone. Greek sculptors valued it above any other material.
Paros marble was used to carve some of the supreme works of Western art. The most famous is the Venus de Milo, the armless Aphrodite that is today one of the stars of the Louvre. Also the majestic Nike (Victory) of Delos, the Hermes of Praxiteles and a good part of the sculptures and reliefs of temples and sanctuaries across the Mediterranean, including elements of the Acropolis of Athens itself. Paros exported its marble throughout the Greek world, and from it came the word 'Parian', which in several languages came to denote marble or porcelain of the highest quality.
What is curious is how the best marble was extracted. Lychnites was not taken from open-air pits but by digging galleries and tunnels beneath the mountain, in the Marathi area, following the finest veins by the light of oil lamps; hence its name, from lychnos, 'lamp'. Those underground mines, with their tunnels dug by hand into the rock over centuries, can still be visited. They were the engine of Paros's wealth and fame, and the reason a small Aegean island left its mark on museums around half the world.
Paros was inhabited from the Neolithic and was, like its neighbours, one of the focal points of the brilliant Cycladic civilisation of the third millennium BC, the one of the marble idols. But its great moment of splendour came in the archaic period, between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, when it became a prosperous, expansive power. Thanks to its marble, its farming and its fleet, the city of Paros built up wealth and founded colonies, the most important of which was Thasos, in the northern Aegean, an island rich in gold and resources that multiplied its power.
From that archaic Paros came one of the most original figures in all of Greek literature: the poet Archilochus (Archilochus of Paros), who lived in the 7th century BC (around 680–645 BC). Archilochus was a revolutionary: one of the first Greek lyric poets to write in the first person, speaking of himself, of his loves, his hatreds, his fears and his life as a mercenary soldier. He was the great master of iambic verse, a metre he used with a freedom, an irony and a bluntness never seen before. One fragment of his is famous, in which he confesses, without a shred of heroic shame, to having thrown away his shield on the battlefield to save his life: 'I'll get another just as good', he says, blowing up the warrior ideal of the age. That personal, biting, human voice made him a forerunner of all later lyric poetry, admired throughout antiquity.
Paros honoured its poet for a long time: there was an Archilocheion on the island, a sanctuary dedicated to his memory, and from that setting comes one of the most valuable pieces the island bequeathed to history: the Parian Chronicle or Marmor Parium, a large marble stele inscribed in the 3rd century BC that records, year by year, a chronology of Greek history and mythology from legendary times to 264/263 BC. It is a historical source of enormous value, today kept partly in Oxford and partly in the island's own museum.
Like all the Aegean islands, Paros was caught up in the great clash between the Greeks and the powerful Persian Empire, the so-called Persian Wars. And in that conflict it made a decision that would cost it dearly: backing the Persians. In 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece, Paros sent a trireme (a warship) to fight on the Persian side at the famous battle of Marathon, where, against all odds, the Athenians won a historic victory.
After that triumph, Athens wanted to settle accounts with the islands that had collaborated with the enemy. The man charged with it was none other than Miltiades, the Athenian general and hero of Marathon. With a fleet, Miltiades laid siege to the city of Paros and demanded that the islanders pay an enormous fine of a hundred talents, a colossal sum. But the Parians resisted firmly and bravely: they held out for twenty-six days without surrendering. In the end the Athenians had to withdraw without taking the city or collecting the fine. For Miltiades it was an outright and even tragic failure: he was wounded in the operation (a wound that became infected) and, back in Athens, he was tried and condemned for the failure, dying shortly afterwards. The resistance of Paros had indirectly defeated the victor of Marathon.
Despite that episode, after the Persian Wars Paros ended up joining, like the rest of the Cyclades, the orbit of Athens and the Delian League. It then followed the common fate of the Greek world: the hegemony of Sparta and then of Macedon, the Hellenistic era of the great kingdoms that emerged after Alexander the Great, and finally incorporation into the Roman Empire. Through all those centuries, marble remained its great hallmark and its source of wealth, though the island lost the political prominence of its archaic period.
With the division of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, Paros became part of the Byzantine Empire, and to that long period it owes one of its most venerable monuments: the Panagia Ekatontapiliani in Parikia, the 'Church of a Hundred Doors'. Its origins go back to the 4th century AD, and tradition links its founding to Saint Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine the Great: it is said that, on her way to the Holy Land in search of the True Cross, Helena stopped at Paros and vowed to raise a church there if she succeeded in her mission. The building we see today is largely the work of a monumental rebuilding in the 6th century, in the time of the emperor Justinian, the same man who raised Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
The Ekatontapiliani is one of the most important and best-preserved early Christian and Byzantine complexes in all of Greece. It is not really one church but a complex of several churches and chapels joined together, with its great central nave and its dome, and above all an exceptional early Christian baptistery, one of the most complete surviving in the eastern Mediterranean, with its cruciform font for the ancient rite of baptism by immersion. Its name, 'of a Hundred Doors', feeds a lovely legend: the church is said to have ninety-nine visible doors and the hundredth, still hidden, will only appear the day Constantinople — which fell in 1453 — is Greek again.
Through the long Byzantine period, Paros was a relatively prosperous Christian island but increasingly exposed to a new danger: piracy. Raids by Arab pirates and, later, by corsairs of every kind made these seas an unsafe place. That constant threat pushed much of the population, over time, to leave the coast and take refuge in the mountainous interior of the island, founding or reinforcing villages such as Lefkes, protected by their distance from the sea and by labyrinthine layouts designed to confuse attackers.
The Fourth Crusade, which in 1204 conquered Constantinople and broke up the Byzantine Empire, changed the fate of the whole Aegean. In the division of the spoils, the Cyclades fell into the hands of Latin adventurers, and Paros was folded, around 1207, into the Duchy of the Archipelago (or Duchy of Naxos) founded by the Venetian Marco Sanudo, with its capital on neighbouring Naxos. For more than three centuries Paros was governed by Venetian feudal lords, first as part of the duchy of the Sanudo family and their successors, and later in the hands of noble families such as the Sommaripa and the Venier. From that period come the castles (kastra) still visible on the island: the Kastro of Parikia, raised on a hill reusing column drums and marble blocks from ancient Greek temples — an impressive piece of 'recycling' of antiquity that can be seen embedded in its walls today — and the small, charming circular castle of Antiparos.
Venetian rule ended with the advance of the Ottoman Empire. In 1537 the fearsome Turkish admiral Barbarossa laid waste to and conquered Paros, which was absorbed into Ottoman rule, where it would remain, with the odd interruption, for almost three centuries. As on other Cycladic islands, Ottoman government was relatively indirect and focused above all on collecting taxes, leaving some autonomy to the local communities and the Orthodox Church. In that period, with the coast still under threat from piracy, Lefkes, in the mountains of the interior, served as capital of the island, safe from attacks from the sea.
Life in Ottoman Paros followed the quiet, modest rhythm of a farming and seafaring island: vineyards and wine, olive trees, fishing, livestock, and the eternal marble, whose intensive ancient exploitation had died out centuries earlier. The island, like so many in the Aegean, was waiting for its moment of liberation, which would come with the great revolution of the 19th century.
When the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire broke out in 1821, the Cyclades joined the national uprising. Paros played its part in the cause, and its history crossed with that of a legendary figure of the revolution: Manto Mavrogenous, the heroine of Mykonos who had financed ships and troops with her personal fortune. Ruined after giving her whole estate to the struggle, Mavrogenous spent her last years precisely in Paros, where she died in 1848; today a statue and a square in Parikia recall her. With the international recognition of Greek independence, sealed between 1828 and 1830, Paros became part of the new Greek state.
Independence did not bring immediate prosperity. Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Paros was a modest rural island living on farming, fishing, winemaking and a brief revival of the Marathi marble quarries, worked again with foreign capital for projects such as Napoleon's tomb. As on so many Aegean islands, the lack of opportunity pushed many Parians to emigrate, to Athens, the United States or Australia, in search of a better life. The island stayed, for decades, on the margins of the wider world.
Everything changed with tourism, which discovered Paros through the second half of the 20th century. Its combination of postcard white villages (Parikia, Naoussa, Lefkes), magnificent beaches, winds ideal for windsurfing and kitesurfing, good food and a lively scene without the excesses or the prices of Mykonos made it one of the best-loved and most balanced islands in the Cyclades. Today Paros lives largely on tourism, but it has managed to keep much of its character: the Church of a Hundred Doors has stood for fifteen centuries, the old marble galleries that produced the Venus de Milo can still be walked, and in the lanes of Lefkes or the harbour of Naoussa there still beats the memory of an island that, thanks to a white translucent stone, left its mark on the art history of all humanity.