About Milos

Milos

There goes a beautiful island, an island with personality. There goes an island which from a distance seems like an ordinary Cycladic one, but it is not. How can it be ordinary when it hides all this life underneath? This “underground” or even stone life that has offered prosperity to the island thanks to the marbles and other rich deposits of a series of minerals.

Well, there is an element that determines the life and the history of Milos: the mineral resources. For centuries, Milos has lived thanks to the hidden “treasures” within the island. This has given economic self-sufficiency to the island and has kept the Beast away until the last decades. When the self-sufficiency was over, for reasons related to the general mistakes in the economy of this country, Milos sought for the necessary revenues in tourism. Fortunately, it was too late for its “development” as it happened with other islands which exclusively rely on tourism...

The entire island lets out a sense of tender abandonment. What do I mean by this? I mean that the image of the past is kept alive, in the two or three towns, Adamas (Diamond, another ironic reminder), Plaka and Apollonia (the land of god Apollo which the locals call Polonia) as well as in the villages, beaches, seacoasts and capes. Let’s take the example of Klima in the northwest edge of the large cove of Milos. It is so authentic, precisely because it is just a fishing village left to its destiny. It looks like a stubborn fisherman who insists on fishing with nets when all the rest are occupied with fish farms –or should I say: tourist farms? Klima is there and seems unaffected from the passing of the time...