Mykonos Windmills

The row of whitewashed mills above Mykonos Town is one of the most recognisable sights in the Cyclades. Locals call them Kato Mili, the lower mills, and they stand on a low hill on the western edge of Chora, facing the harbour and the channel that leads across to Delos. They were working machinery rather than decoration: for some four centuries they ground the grain that moved through one of the busiest trading islands of the central Aegean.

History of the Mykonos Windmills

The mills date from the 16th century and are attributed to the island's Venetian rulers, who held Mykonos until 1537, when it passed to the Ottomans. They milled wheat and barley, the island's main crops, and they also served passing ships, which called at Mykonos to take on flour and supplies on the route between Europe and the Levant. The choice of site was practical. The meltemi, the dry north wind of the Aegean summer, blows across the island for weeks at a time, and the mills were set to face it.

The design is standard across the Cyclades: a squat cylindrical tower, whitewashed, with a conical roof of wood and reed thatch, small openings that keep out the sun and the worst of the wind, and triangular canvas sails rigged on a rotating cap. Two of the mills can be entered. The Geronymos Mill is the oldest still standing on Mykonos; it worked into the 20th century and has been restored with most of its original grinding machinery in place.

Wind milling ended in the middle of the 20th century, when imported flour and electric mills made the sails redundant. The buildings survived because they were solidly built and because they had already become the island's signature image. None of them grind commercially today, and the two that are open to the public work as museums.

Which Mills to See

• Kato Mili - seven mills in a row on the hill above Chora, a few minutes on foot from Little Venice. The line reads best from below, from the waterfront or from the sea; up close the hill is exposed and usually very windy.
• Bonis Windmill - restored in the 1990s and now part of the Agricultural Museum of Mykonos, on a hill just outside Chora. It holds displays of traditional Mykonian farming equipment and the mill's own mechanism has been kept intact.
• Gioras bakery - the oldest working wood-fired bakery on the island, in Mykonos Town, run by the same family for more than two centuries. It still bakes paximadi, the hard Mykonian rusk, in a wood oven, and its flour once came from the mills on the hill above.

Visiting the Windmills

The windmill hill is open ground with no gate and no ticket, so the mills can be seen at any hour. Little Venice lies directly below: a line of houses built out over the water by merchants and sea captains, the first of them put up around the middle of the 18th century, with wooden balconies overhanging the waves. The stretch between the mills and Little Venice is where most visitors watch the sun go down, and the cafes along it fill up an hour before sunset in July and August.

Chora is small enough that the mills are a few minutes' walk uphill from the old port, and buses and taxis from the new port and the airport stop at Fabrika square, the nearest terminus. The Agricultural Museum at the Bonis Windmill keeps seasonal hours and is normally open in summer only, so it is worth checking before making the climb.

The best angle on Kato Mili is not from the hill at all but from the water. Seen from the channel between Chora and Delos the seven cones line up along the ridge, which is how sailors approaching the harbour saw them for four hundred years, and anyone chartering a gulet from Mykonos gets that view on the way out.