Syros
Overview
Syros is the working capital of the Cyclades. Its main town, Ermoupoli, is the administrative seat of the islands and the rare place in the chain that runs all year. Restaurants are open in February, the schools are full, and the harbour is busy with car ferries and freight as well as tourist boats. The whitewashed cubes of the usual Cycladic image are absent. Ermoupoli is a marble-paved nineteenth-century town of neoclassical mansions, civic squares and shipyards still in use.
The town made its fortune in the early nineteenth century, when refugees from Chios and other islands, fleeing Ottoman reprisals, settled here. Ermoupoli quickly became the busiest commercial port in Greece and held that position until Piraeus overtook it towards the end of the century. The Apollon Theatre, opened in 1864 as a small-scale replica of La Scala, shows that period most clearly. It still works, with concerts and the occasional opera in winter.
Two hills rise above the harbour. Ano Syros, the older settlement, was founded by the Venetians in the thirteenth century and is still the island’s Catholic quarter, with narrow stepped lanes, a fortified church and a quiet the lower town lacks. Vrontado, opposite, is the Orthodox quarter, crowned by the Cathedral of the Resurrection. The two communities have shared the island since the Venetian period, and the calendars of their feast days interlock in a way you do not see elsewhere in the Cyclades.
Syros is the home of Greek loukoumi and the birthplace of Markos Vamvakaris, the patriarch of rebetiko music. His old neighbourhood in Ano Syros has a small museum. Three nights is a sensible stay, and the right months are May, September and October. At the height of summer Syros is hotter and harder than its neighbours.
House Notes
Arrival
Syros National Airport (JSY) takes 30-minute flights from Athens, and daily ferries from Piraeus dock at Ermoupoli, the capital of the Cyclades. Crossings between Tinos, Mykonos and Syros take 30 to 45 minutes, so the island fits easily into a wider arrival in the Cyclades by sea or air.
Aristide
Aristide is a neoclassical and Art Deco mansion on the high street of Ermoupoli, restored as a hotel by Oana Aristide. Nine kinds of Greek marble run through the interior, a permanent art collection hangs in the public rooms, and an artist-in-residence gallery fills the ground floor. The earthier colours are a deliberate break from the blue and white usual in the Cyclades.
The kitchens
Allou Yialou, the seafood platform at Kini, is the place for sunset: a whitewashed dining room hung with white curtains, and the morning’s catch grilled simply. Lilis, on a medieval lane in Ano Syros, is the choice for meze (small shared plates), lamb and a terrace that looks down on Ermoupoli. Stin Ithaki tou Ai, in a backstreet of Ermoupoli, serves the daily specials that locals come for.
The Apollon Theatre
The Italian architect Pietro Sampo designed the theatre on the central square of Ermoupoli between 1862 and 1864, working from four Italian theatres at once: La Scala chief among them, with San Carlo at Naples, the Pergola at Florence and Castelfranco. A plain two-storey shell of plastered façades on a low marble base opens onto a tiered auditorium of 350 seats, its ceiling painted with poets and composers. Ask the house to open it on a quiet morning, outside the programme.
Vamvakaris
On Saint Sebastian Street in Ano Syros, an old two-storey house holds the relics of Markos Vamvakaris: his manuscripts, his ring and watch, his identity papers, the passport he never used, his photographs and personal memorabilia. Born in Ano Syros in 1905, he gave rebetiko, the Greek urban folk music, the Frangosyriani, and the house has kept his memory since 1995. The climb up through the medieval quarter is half the visit.
Korres and Sykoutris loukoumi
Craftsmen from Constantinople, who came with the refugees from Chios in 1822, brought the recipe for loukoumi, the soft sweet often called Turkish delight, and the mineralised water of Syros gave it its delicacy. Korres in Ermoupoli has made it since the 1960s, and Sykoutris since 1928. Both ship abroad, and visits to either workshop are arranged through the front of house.
The Neorion shipyard
Neorion, founded in 1861, was among the most important heavy industries in 19th-century Greece. The yard built the country’s first metal steamship, the Athena, in 1893, and is still in operation as ONEX Syros Shipyards, with 1,100 metres of quay and two floating dry docks. The cranes are visible from Vaporia, the neoclassical quarter at sea level.
Vaporia
Vaporia is the 19th-century shipowners’ neighbourhood on the eastern edge of Ermoupoli, where neoclassical mansions face the sea and their terraces step out onto the rocks. Agios Nikolaos, the blue-domed cathedral built in the middle of that century with gifts from shipowners and the diaspora, stands on the headland and is the first sight from an approaching ferry. Locals swim at Asteria, at the foot of the mansions.
The Industrial Museum
The museum keeps Ermoupoli’s 19th-century industry in four restored buildings: the Katsimantis Paint Factory (1888), the Kornilakis Tannery (1880), the Anairousis scoop works and the Velissaropoulos textile mill. The paddle wheel of the steamship Patris, recovered from the Andros wreck in 2010, stands in the courtyard. Upstairs is the Enfield 8000 electric car, built at Neorion in the 1970s.
San Giorgio
The Catholic Cathedral of Saint George, at the top of the medieval hill of Ano Syros, was built around 1200 and took its present form in an 1834 restoration by the Tinian architect Nikolaos Hatzisimos. It is still the seat of the Catholic Diocese of Syros, and holds the oldest church organ in Greece, a neo-Gothic instrument of 1888 brought from Athens in 1951 and restored to playing in 2019 through the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The only approach is on foot, up the stepped lanes.
Anchorage Notes
Ermoupoli
Ermoupoli is the commercial and cruise port of Syros and the administrative harbour of the whole Cyclades, and the Port Fund seated here answers for Syros, Kea, Kythnos and Serifos together. A yacht takes the town quay among working freight and cruise calls, in a port with at least two ferry routes a day to Piraeus. The harbour lies along the nineteenth-century city.
The marina
Apart from the working quay, the Port Fund keeps a marina at Ermoupoli: the island’s designated yacht facility, laid out separately from the freight and the ferries. A chartered vessel is meant to lie here in the capital, close under the marble tiers of the town rather than alongside the cargo. The berth is arranged with the Fund, not settled on the quay on the day.
Finikas
Finikas, on the southwest coast, is the island’s organised marina: the Port Fund’s yachting harbour, with water, power and a reception. It has 110 metres of quay along the inner basin and as much again on the outer pier, and takes up to 40 boats. A yacht chooses it over the capital when it wants the order of a marina rather than the working port.
Kini
Kini, on the west coast, is a fishing village whose small harbour the Port Fund counts among its fishing shelters, with the working boats drawn up on the quay and the settlement behind. It faces the sunset where Ermoupoli faces the dawn. A tender comes in for an evening rather than a stay, for a quiet call on the far side of the island from the capital’s traffic.