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| In 326 AD, Saint Helen, the mother of the
Emperor Constantine, was stranded in Paros on a trip from Rome to the Holy
Land. Upon a successful trip, she promised to build a church, and while she
didn't live to complete it, the Emperor Justinian did, in the sixth century
AD. The church is called the Church of a Hundred Doors, though you can only
find about a dozen on a quick visit. It's said that Isadore of Miletus,
builder of Ayia Sophia (in Constantinople, now Istanbul), was consumed with
jealousy when his apprentice Ignatius produced this masterpiece. Isadore
tried to shove Ignatius from the roof, but Ignatius grabbed his foot, and
they both tumbled to their deaths. You can see at right only a small portion of the iconostasis. The iconostasis is a large wall towards the front of a Greek Orthodox church, separating the altar from the congregation. In this church, the iconostasis is constructed of local marble and adorned with several painted icons. |
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This was the morning traffic jam in Paros. A farmer brought
his wares to town and docked his donkey crosswise on the narrow street. The
donkey stood motionless as pedestrians tried to get by, all of them
eventually vaulting over the potted plant at the donkey's back end. Here's a
rhetorical question: Would you buy the vegetables in the back baskets?
The streets are paved in Parian marble, prized for its ability to absorb light. Parian marble is considered even finer than the Carrara marble Michelangelo carved. Marble from Paros was used in ancient statues such as the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace (Winged Victory.) The quarries were closed once they couldn't use slaves to work in the tunnels, and they reopened only once to get marble for Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides. |
| Here, in the local museum, is a well-preserved fourth-century BC mosaic of Europa on the bull. The museum is in a seventeenth-century building, once a school whose most famous pupil was Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. |  |
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Naxos is in the center of Cycladic ancient civilization, and
was the source of many of the surviving marble figurines from the Bronze
Age. Naxos, like Paros, had an early trade in marble and sculpture. Naxian
sculptors carved the lions at Delos, for example.
The earliest figurines were shaped like violins and represented fertility goddesses. Most of them were found in graves, though some very large figurines might have been inside shrines. By 2600 BC, the figurines had evolved to look like those at left. Most represent females, sometimes pregnant, or with a line across the hips signifying recent childbirth. Male and female figures are characterized by flat-topped heads, slightly tipped backwards on a long neck, and most often arms folded across the chest. On Naxos, sculptors cut and carved the marble using no tools but abrasive emery. |