Paros 🇬🇷 Two Thousand Years of the Sculptor’s Favourite Island

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 14

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Paros is the island tourists pass through on their way to somewhere else. They are leaving the quarry of the ancient world.

Paros became the sculptor’s island

The marble that came out of Paros was not the same material as the marble that came out of anywhere else. A slab of it, cut thin enough, is translucent. Hold it up to the sun and the light passes through — not as a reflection but as a glow, dim and warm, like candle-light behind an old church window. This property has a name: lychnites, from lychnos, the Greek word for oil lamp. The ancient quarries on Mount Marathi, in the centre of the island, were worked not at the surface but underground, in long galleries cut deep into the mountain, lit by oil lamps whose glow had to pass through the stone itself to reach the next working face. The quarrymen called the best grade of their own material after the lamps they cut by. The marble remembered the light it was born in.

This is the physical reason Paros became the sculptor’s island. Most white marble reflects. Parian absorbs, carries, and releases. A face carved from Parian marble does not look like a face made of stone. It looks, in the particular honey of afternoon light, like a face with something behind it. Praxiteles understood this in the fourth century BC when he chose Parian for the Hermes now in Olympia. The unknown sculptor who carved the Venus de Milo in the second century BC understood it. The unknown sculptor who carved the Nike of Samothrace — the winged victory at the top of the Louvre staircase — understood it. Nearly every piece of Greek sculpture that a visitor to the Louvre, the British Museum, the Vatican, or the Getty instinctively thinks of when they think of classical beauty was cut from Paros. For roughly a thousand years, from the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD, this island was the quarry of the ancient Mediterranean’s idea of the human body.

The quarries themselves are still there, on Mount Marathi, inland from the small village of Marathi in the centre of the island. You can walk into them. They are open, unguarded, largely unsignposted — two great galleries cut horizontally into the mountain, one of them a hundred metres deep, the walls still carrying the chisel marks of men who were working in the sixth century BC. The floor is littered with broken pieces of rejected marble. A fragment in your pocket weighs less than it looks like it should. The chamber is cooler than the outside by several degrees, even in August. This is the room the classical world was carved out of. There is no ticket office. There is no rope. There is, if you arrive on a weekday, usually nobody else.

Paros’ other great gift to memory was also cut from the same stone. In 264 BC — nobody knows by whom — a seven-foot slab of Parian marble was inscribed with a chronicle. In tightly packed Greek letters, it listed, by year, the major events of Greek history from the reign of King Kekrops in 1581 BC down to the year the chronicle itself was carved — more than thirteen hundred years on a single stone. The Trojan War. The first Olympic games in 776 BC. The birth of Homer, of Hesiod, of Sappho, of Socrates. The defeat of Xerxes. The death of Alexander. It is the oldest surviving dated chronology of the ancient Greek world, and for certain events it remains the only source that tells us when, precisely, they were supposed to have happened. Today it is called the Parian Marble. The largest fragment is held in Oxford, at the Ashmolean Museum. A smaller fragment is still on Paros, in the archaeological museum of Parikia. An island famous for carving the world’s memory of beauty also, without particular fanfare, carved the world’s memory of itself.

Parikia, the island’s main town, was built almost entirely from this material, often by recycling it. The Church of Panagia Ekatontapyliani — Our Lady of a Hundred Doors — was founded, tradition says, by Empress Helena in the fourth century, on her way back from Jerusalem with the True Cross. The building she commissioned was completed by her son Constantine the Great and rebuilt several times since, most famously by Justinian in the sixth century. Its columns and lintels are pieces of older Greek temples, cut and fitted with a casualness that only a people who had more marble than they knew what to do with could have afforded. Every wall of Parikia repeats the trick. An archway above a small bakery is a temple architrave. A kerbstone is a statue base. A garden wall contains the fluted shaft of a column that probably held up something Praxiteles would have recognised. The island recycles itself, and has been doing so for fifteen hundred years.

Most islands have an industry that made them and then faded. Paros’ industry made everything. For a thousand years this island sold the raw material of how the ancient world pictured itself. Everything the Greeks and Romans wanted to believe about the human form — the draped folds of a goddess’s robe, the wet muscle of a young athlete, the precise expression on a wounded face — came out of galleries in this mountain, shipped across the Aegean as rough blocks, and was finished in Athens, in Rhodes, in Pergamon, in Rome. Paros did not sculpt the classical world. Paros let the classical world sculpt itself. The stone carried the light in. The sculptor found the form already there.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and forty-seven weeks remaining.

Some islands are photographed. This one was carved.

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