Overview

Mykonos is a legend - a dry granitic island transformed into the upmarket tourist destination of today. It has become a place for those who desire their Greek island to be an extension of the city - cosmopolitan, busy, materially well-provided, a place to show off new clothes. The barren landscape of the island is adorned with 800 or so chapels and churches that seem to spout from every rock. Apollo and Artemis, twin siblings, were born under a palm-tree on Delos. This divine association had the effect of supercharging this tiny outcrop into the most sacred place in the ancient Aegean and consequently one of the most important archaeological areas in the Greek Islands today. The site is immense. On the slopes of Mount Kynthos are some of the best preserved houses from the ancient Greek world, decorated with fine mosaics and painting, while the museum contains finds of astonishing quality. Nowhere else in the Greek world have the remains of a whole city and a sanctuary of such wide-ranging importance been preserved undisturbed by modern building.

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9781907859038

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Delightful, well-observed, literary accompaniments to the Greek islands, by a British scholar.A The Economist,Books of the Year 2010 So evocative and informative, one hardly needs to go... Lovely...A Bettany Hughes, Sunday Herald - Books of the Year2010 A remarkable achievement - a complete, island by island, 3,000 page survey of all the historical monuments in the Aegean...A Barnaby Rogerson, Country Life Wonderful... superbly structured; immense learning elegantly, unobtrusively offered; and outstandingly well writtenA Prof. Jon Stallworthy, Wolfson College, Oxford

Author Information

Nigel McGilchrist lectures widely in art and archaeology at museums and institutions both in Europe and in the United States. He was Director of the Anglo-Italian Institute in Rome for six years, taught at the University of Rome, for the University of Massachusetts and was for seven years Dean of the joint Faculty of European Studies for a consortium of American Universities and Colleges. In recent years he has been lecturing at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. Over the last six years he has walked every path and village of the sixty inhabited Greek Aegean islands in order to prepare the twenty volumes of McGilchrist's Greek Islands. He lives near Orvieto in Italy where he produces olive oil and red wine.

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