THE CYCLADES – ISLANDS OF LIGHT
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WORDS © MARION FRIEDEL
The Cyclades, or ring of islands, was the name given by the ancient Greeks to this archipelago in the Aegean, because it seemed to them that they formed a protective circle around the tiny isle of Delos, which was their most important and sacred shrine.
Odysseus’ ten years of wandering through these islands is one of the great epics of classical antiquity. “Greece recognises no-one who is not on intimate terms with its islands,” writes the modern poet Johannes Gaitanides, The Cyclades are a world of islands all to itself. Sheer cliffs, a lack of water and ferocious winds are what define their landscape. The Cyclades are linked by sea, by the Aegean. Embraced by the deep blue water of the Aegean the rocky Cyclades are monuments of Greek island culture. They are famous for their incredible, dazzling light, cube-shaped buildings, and countless coves for bathing, edged with the finest sand.
There are some 300 Cyclades – of which only 24 are inhabited - and on a clear day they appear so close to each other that one can well imagine them to be the peaks of a submerged mountain range. “They are never out of sight of one another,” wrote Gaitanides.”The sea never vanishes into emptiness, never fades into infinity…nowhere does the sun go down without silhouetting a distant island as it sets.” However, all island-lovers who travel to the Cyclades should carry with them this warning from the poet Gaitanides:
“He who is driven to the Aegean by the wearisome events of our age, will not find what he is seeking. For the islands are harsh and austere, they breathe poverty, they are not places of perfect bliss but of pitiless drudgery…they are islands in the midst of history, not outside it, they provide recuperation for realists, not a refuge for romantics. It is not those who are running away from themselves, or from the modern age, who find fulfilment there, but only those wishing to find themselves. For Europeans it is a journey homeward…to the place where mankind was born, where our eyes were awakened to beauty, where Europe’s heart first began to beat, its mind to question and its hands to shape.”
THE CYCLADES – ISLANDS OF LIGHT
WORDS © MARION FRIEDEL
WORDS © MARION FRIEDEL
The Cyclades, or ring of islands, was the name given by the ancient Greeks to this archipelago in the Aegean, because it seemed to them that they formed a protective circle around the tiny isle of Delos, which was their most important and sacred shrine.
Odysseus’ ten years of wandering through these islands is one of the great epics of classical antiquity. “Greece recognises no-one who is not on intimate terms with its islands,” writes the modern poet Johannes Gaitanides, The Cyclades are a world of islands all to itself. Sheer cliffs, a lack of water and ferocious winds are what define their landscape. The Cyclades are linked by sea, by the Aegean. Embraced by the deep blue water of the Aegean the rocky Cyclades are monuments of Greek island culture. They are famous for their incredible, dazzling light, cube-shaped buildings, and countless coves for bathing, edged with the finest sand.
There are some 300 Cyclades – of which only 24 are inhabited - and on a clear day they appear so close to each other that one can well imagine them to be the peaks of a submerged mountain range. “They are never out of sight of one another,” wrote Gaitanides.”The sea never vanishes into emptiness, never fades into infinity…nowhere does the sun go down without silhouetting a distant island as it sets.” However, all island-lovers who travel to the Cyclades should carry with them this warning from the poet Gaitanides:
“He who is driven to the Aegean by the wearisome events of our age, will not find what he is seeking. For the islands are harsh and austere, they breathe poverty, they are not places of perfect bliss but of pitiless drudgery…they are islands in the midst of history, not outside it, they provide recuperation for realists, not a refuge for romantics. It is not those who are running away from themselves, or from the modern age, who find fulfilment there, but only those wishing to find themselves. For Europeans it is a journey homeward…to the place where mankind was born, where our eyes were awakened to beauty, where Europe’s heart first began to beat, its mind to question and its hands to shape.”
THE CYCLADES – ISLANDS OF LIGHT
WORDS © MARION FRIEDEL