Reid & Robie

Located in the Cyclades and surrounded by the blue-green water of the Aegean sits whitewashed, windmill-strewn Mykonos, the island of the winds.

– Le Corbusier

This week’s post is a Throwback Thursday edition looking back at our visit to the Greek Island of Mykonos.

Our second long term stop on this retired nomad journey was to the island of Ikaria, Greece in the small village of Therma. Arriving in October 2024 we found it was off season, quiet and peaceful with virtually no tourists.

Reid and I decided to go to Mykonos, only two hours away by ferry. While the island is one of the most visited in Greece, the week before Christmas we found the place deserted as we stayed in a lovely two-story apartment with a rooftop deck in the heart of the old town.

Despite the festive season, we mostly had the town to ourselves. After returning to Ikaria, we only had a short time before leaving Greece for Albania and somehow never got around to posting photos from Mykonos–until now. Today we’re sharing a brief history of the island with a few photographs.

A brief history of Mykonos

Mykonos’s origins are rooted in Greek mythology where it was named after its first ruler, a descendant of the god Apollo. According to legend, the island was the battleground where Hercules defeated the Giants whose petrified bodies formed the island’s distinctive, jagged granite boulders. During antiquity, Mykonos remained a poor agricultural island, overshadowed by its neighbor, Delos, a sacred sanctuary and bustling commercial hub for which Mykonos served as a resupply station.

Following the decline of the Roman Empire, Mykonos became part of the Byzantine Empire and suffered frequent raids by Saracen pirates, prompting defensive architectural developments. After the Fourth Crusade in 1207, the island fell under Venetian rule which brought western European trade networks and structural influences to the Cyclades.

The iconic, tightly packed waterfront buildings of modern Mykonos known as “Little Venice” began during this era along with the iconic windmills of the island. Built by the Venetians starting in the 16th century, they harnessed the island’s strong northern winds to grind wheat and barley into flour.

In 1537, notorious Turkish admiral Barbarossa conquered Mykonos. Under Ottoman rule, the islanders secured a system of self-governance with low taxation that allowed their fleets to flourish while balancing legal maritime trade with lucrative illegal piracy work. This newfound wealth played a crucial part in Greece’s 1821 War of Independence as Mykonos contributed dozens of ships to the cause and successfully defended the island thanks to the family fortune of one woman, Manto Mavrogenous.

After the war, the introduction of steamships and opening of the Corinth Canal saw a shift of traditional sailing routes that bypassed Mykonos causing severe economic collapse and mass emigration. The island’s modern renaissance began in the 1930s when archaeologists and wealthy tourists started visiting the ruins of Delos. Using Mykonos as a base, they were charmed by its pristine beaches and by the 1950s and 1960s, international icons like Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Brigitte Bardot transformed the once-impoverished island into a global epicenter of luxury tourism making the maze of streets made to confuse pirates into one of the world’s most sought-after holiday destinations.