Naxos

People lived around the bay at Chora long before the Greeks wrote history: a Mycenaean town stood at Grotta, where its remains still lie partly under the sea. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC Naxos dominated the trade of the Cyclades, grew rich on marble and emery, and was among the first places in Greece where marble sculpture developed. Around 546 BC the aristocrat Lygdamis seized power and began great building projects, including the temple of Apollo on Palatia, the islet where Theseus was said to have abandoned Ariadne; he was overthrown in 524 BC and the temple was never finished. A failed Persian attack in 499 BC helped set off the Ionian Revolt, and in 490 BC a Persian fleet captured and burned the town. Later Naxos became the first member of the Athenian-led Delian League to try to leave it, and was forced to stay.

In Byzantine times pirate raids drove much of the population inland, and the island's capital moved to the castle of Apalirou. After the Fourth Crusade the Venetian Marco Sanudo took the island, burning his own vessels, according to some sources, to spur on his soldiers, and in 1207 built the Kastro on the old acropolis as the seat of his Duchy of the Archipelago. Twenty-one dukes ruled until 1566, when the Ottomans deposed the last of them.

Very few Turks ever settled, and the island joined the War of Independence in 1821 and the Greek state in 1832. Houses spread beyond the old quarters in the early 20th century, refugees from Asia Minor built the Prosfygika district in the 1920s, and later decades of migration from the villages filled the new streets south of the Kastro.

Chora carries two traditions side by side. The Kastro was home to the Venetian and Latin lords who ruled the island for centuries, and some of their descendants still live there; its Catholic cathedral, churches and monasteries survive from those centuries. The town below, Orthodox and Greek-speaking, has its own cathedral and its own feasts, among them the processions for St Nicodemus in July and for the Panagia Chrysopolitissa in November.

The island's ancient fame lives on in its marble. Naxian sculptors were among the earliest in Greece, Naxian works were dedicated at Delos and Delphi, and unfinished statues still lie in the quarries inland. The myth of Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos and found by Dionysus, the island's protector, gave Richard Strauss his opera Ariadne auf Naxos. More recently the town has appeared in films from Two Tickets to Greece to the Bollywood film Tiger Zinda Hai, one of whose songs was shot here.

Carnival brings three days of costumed parades with torches. The football club Pannaxiakos is based in the town. Many wealthy Athenians keep houses in the inland villages of Halki and Filoti, and in rural areas locals readily offer walkers a lift.

Chora had 8,897 inhabitants at the 2021 census, out of 20,578 on the whole island, and it is the seat of the municipality of Naxos and the Lesser Cyclades. Naxos is the most fertile island of the Cyclades and the most self-sufficient, with vegetable and fruit crops and cattle breeding alongside tourism, and Naxian marble is still quarried and exported.

The town is the island's service centre, with its port, hospital, schools and offices, while visitors fill the beach villages to the south. The port is too small for cruise ships, which spares the town the crowds of some neighbours. Daily concerns are practical: tap water from the dams is not fit to drink, so most residents use filters or bottled water, and after years of low rainfall desalination plants were installed near the town hall in 2024. Summer traffic and parking have grown steadily worse as ferries bring in more cars, part of the seafront promenade collapsed in 2023 and was still being restored in 2025, and patients needing specialist care must still be taken to Athens.

Life follows the ferries and the seasons: busy summer evenings on the promenade, when the road closes to cars at night, and a much quieter winter when the town returns to its residents.

Naxos is known across Greece for its produce. Its fertile valleys give the richest variety of food in the Cyclades, and the island is famous for its potatoes, for arseniko cheese, for graviera — a hard cheese that resembles gruyère — and for honey made largely from thyme nectar. Local olive oil keeps much of its olive flavour.

The island's own drink is kitron, a liqueur made from the fruit and leaves of the citron tree. It comes in three varieties — a sweeter green one, a stronger yellow one and a colourless one in between — and is drunk as a digestif. The first distillery was established in the village of Halki in 1896, and the drink is hard to find outside Naxos because citron trees are scarce.

In Chora, the tavernas of the promenade and the old quarter serve Greek staples such as moussaka and souvlaki alongside island meat, cheese and vegetables. Meals start with meze in the early evening, and main courses arrive much later. Village bakeries sell spanakopita, baklava and loukoumi.