Melos Mílos

Chief place: Mílos

Airport 5km/3mi from Mílos.

The island of Melos or Mílos (from the Greek word for "apple": Italian Milo), the most westerly of the larger Cyclades, owes its distinctive topography and the pattern of its economy to its origin as the caldera of a volcano of the Pliocene period - an origin to which the sulfurous springs in the northeast and southeast of the island still bear witness.

It has one of the best harbors in the Mediterranean, formed when the sea broke into the crater through a gap on its northwest side. The northeastern half of the island is flatter and more fertile than the hilly southwest, which rises to 751m/2464ft in Mt Profítis Ilías. The island's main economic resources are its rich deposits of minerals, including pumice, alum, sulfur and clay. The tourist trade now also makes a contribution to the economy.

The island was already densely populated in the third millennium B.C., when the inhabitants made implements and weapons from the large local deposits of obsidian and exported them all over the Aegean and as far afield as Asia Minor and Egypt.

About 1200 B.C. Dorian incomers settled on the island and founded the city of Melos, defended by walls and towers, on a hill on the north side of Mílos Bay, on the site of present-day Kástro, with its harbor at what is now the hamlet of Klíma. They prospered through the export of sulfur, pumice, clay and alum, as well as oil and honey.

Melos reached the peak of its artistic achievement in Roman and Early Christian times. Its best known work is the Aphrodite of Melos or Venus de Milo (second century B.C.), now in the Louvre.

After the fall of the Roman Empire Melos became Byzantine; in the Middle Ages it belonged to the Venetian duchy of Náxos; and after centuries of Turkish rule it became part of the newly established kingdom of Greece in 1832.