Old Town Mykonos

Mykonos Town — Chora to everyone who lives there — spreads along the west coast of the island, between the old port and the windmills on the hill above it. Mykonos belongs to the Cyclades, in the central Aegean, and Chora is a textbook example of the Cycladic town plan: whitewashed cube houses, painted doors and shutters, and a deliberate maze of lanes that is genuinely easy to get lost in.

The History of Mykonos Old Town

Carians, Ionians and Byzantines

Herodotus records Carians on the island before the Greeks arrived. Ionian settlers came from Athens in the early 11th century BC, and their settlement is the ancestor of the present town. Mykonos then passed through Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine rule without ever becoming rich: thin soil and constant wind made it a place ships stopped at rather than one that prospered on its own.

Venetians, Windmills and Little Venice

Venetian control began in 1204, when the Ghisi family took the island after the Fourth Crusade. Venice governed it directly from 1390 until the Ottomans took over in 1537. It was the Venetians who built the first windmills, in the 16th century, using the steady northerly winds to grind grain for ships crossing the Cyclades; the island had more than two dozen mills at its peak. Seven of them survive in the row above the harbour known as Kato Mili. Two are open to visitors — the Geronymos Mill, the oldest on the island, which was still producing flour in the 1960s and keeps most of its grinding machinery, and Boni's Mill, restored in the 1990s and now the Agricultural Museum.

Little Venice, the line of houses with wooden balconies overhanging the water, is later than the name suggests. Merchants and sea captains built them from the middle of the 18th century, with their front doors on the lane and their lower floors opening straight onto the sea.

Manto Mavrogenous and the Revolution

Manto Mavrogenous, an aristocrat born and educated in Trieste, led Mykonos during the 1821 revolution against Ottoman rule. She fitted out ships at her own expense and spent most of her family's fortune on the war; she died in poverty on Paros in 1848. The square at the centre of the old town carries her name and her statue.

Walking the Old Town

Panagia Paraportiani, by the entrance to the Kastro quarter, is the most photographed church in the Cyclades: five separate chapels merged into a single whitewashed mass, built and added to between the 15th and 17th centuries. The shape is the result of four ground-level churches supporting a fifth built on top of them.

Matogianni Street is the commercial spine of the town — boutiques, jewellers and galleries by day, restaurants and bars by night. It feeds into a network of smaller lanes where the shops get cheaper and the crowds thin out. Alefkandra, at the Little Venice end, is where people gather for the sunset, and the tables along the water there price themselves accordingly.

The old port is still working: fishing boats, small ferries and the day boats out to the archaeological site on Delos, about half an hour away. Chora is also a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Mykonos, who come ashore here rather than at the newer port at Tourlos, a couple of kilometres up the coast.

Practical Notes

Staying in Chora puts you within walking distance of the restaurants, the bars and the bus terminals that serve the beaches on the south coast. The trade-off is noise, since the bars run very late. Boutique hotels are scattered through the lanes of the old town; the larger beach hotels and resorts are all outside it.

The town is quiet in the morning, with many shops not opening until late, and fills through the afternoon, peaking at sunset around Little Venice and the windmills. Cars are kept out of the centre, so everything is done on foot. If you are only ashore for a day, walk the lanes first and leave the waterfront for the end of the afternoon.