The Milians have not made much fuss about the site where the statue lay interred for a couple of millennia. Yet Milos might be best known for what it does not have: the marble Venus de Milo, now ensconced in the Louvre, was found in the earth here in 1820. I jumped off a cliff into the crystalline sea, swimming along channels on the seabed, twisting and turning through the serpentine rocky structures. From time to time there was a boom of water echoing around the caverns beneath. I swam at Sarakinika where the coastal rock is dazzling white, a mix of volcanic ash, sandstone and pumice, shaped by wind and water morphed into sea stacks, arches and bridges. There’s also the old town of Plaka with its laid-back bars and taverns, and colourful fishermen’s houses at Firopotamos. My first stop was Milos, where I hired a car to explore the seahorse-shaped island known for tales of unscrupulous pirates in centuries past, who found refuge here among hidden coves and caves, such as at Papafragas. It is a dreamy, ethereal thing, voyaging across the Aegean, punctured only by the frantic nature of dockings: ropes being flung with gusto upon the port trucks swiftly latching and unlatching loads rental cars reversing awkwardly on board the exchange of passengers, scrabbling for masks smokers agitatedly lighting up. We stopped a number of times – at Ios, then Sikinos, Folegandros and Kimolos – circuiting bays and craggy outcrops of islands, slipping into natural harbours. The sea was a flat calm the morning I travelled from Santorini for Milos the slow-moving ferry broke the reflections of the rocky hillsides in the otherwise undisturbed water. I listen out for the sirens readying to lure me in, imagining all the shipwrecks that must be on the seabed and reflect on all the fishermen, merchants, warriors and explorers, who have coursed these routes for millennia. I think of bedtime stories of warships on a mission to Troy a bad-tempered Poseidon raising up tempests and tsunamis Aphrodite birthing from a conch shell Odysseus’s return across the sea to Penelope a submerged Atlantis. There are thousands of intricate routes, criss-crossing the islands of the Aegean, Ionian and the Sea of Crete.Įven travelling by standard scheduled ferry, there is something romantic, mythical even, about these glittering blue waters. Looking at a map of the ferry routes in Greece is like gazing at the engineering feat of the web of an orb spider.
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