Cyclades, The by Freely John

Author:Freely, John.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

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Syros

My first impression of Syros, from the deck of the Despina in June 1962, was that it was utterly barren and rock-bound. As we passed along the north-eastern shore of the island, approaching the port at Ermoupolis, there was not a tree nor terraced farm or vineyard in sight on the tawny mountains that plunge into the sea without intervening strands. But apparently it wasn’t always like this. In Book XV of the Odyssey the faithful swineherd Eumaios praises the abundance of the island, his birthplace, which he describes to Odysseus as being ‘good for cattle and good for sheep, full of vineyards, and wheat raising’.

Syros is one of the smaller inhabited isles of the Cyclades, with an area of 84 square kilometres, only one-fifth the size of Naxos. But it has a population of 22,220, the largest in the archipelago, due to its role as the hub of the Cyclades. Ermoupolis is both the capital and by far the most important port of the Cyclades, with connections to other parts of the archipelago and other islands in the Aegean, as well as an air service from Athens.

The port of Ermoupolis is protected by a long breakwater to the east, and only after the ferry rounds this does the town come into view, suddenly and dramatically, with its tiered houses rising up the slopes of two hills, both of them crowned with churches. On the western hill is the Catholic church of Agios Yiorgios, which surmounts Ano Syra, the medieval Latin town, and on the eastern is the Greek Orthodox church of the Anastasis (Resurrection), which crowns the Vrontado hill, marking the top of Ermoupolis, the new town that came into being during the Greek War of Independence.

Syros was in antiquity one of the least significant of the Cyclades, and it is not mentioned by Herodotus, Thucydides or Pausanias. Strabo refers to it only as one of the Cyclades, particularly as the birthplace of Pherecydes, one of the earliest known Greek philosophers. According to tradition, Pherecydes was born early in the sixth century BC in Syros, where he founded a school of philosophy, his most renowned student being Pythagoras of Samos. Ancient sources say that Pherecydes was the first to talk about the immortality and transmigration of souls, concepts generally attributed to both Pythagoras and Plato. He was also one of the first Greek astronomers, and is traditionally credited with the invention of the sundial. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, is the source for the strange story that Pherecydes died on Delos after being consumed by lice, and that before he passed away he was visited there by his old student Pythagoras.

During the medieval Byzantine era the island was known as Souda, which the Latins changed to Lasouda, a name that survived up until the fifteenth century.

Throughout the Latin period the island was ruled by the Dukes of Naxos or their heirs, who when in residence here styled themselves as ‘Barons of Lasouda’. One of the first

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