GEEO Greek Islands Google Earth Presentation

— Stop 1 —

USA

Today, I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to Greece through a non-profit organization called GEEO. GEEO helps educators travel abroad so that they can learn more about different cultures to share with their students. I was joined on my trip by educators and retired teachers from all around the United States.

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Europe

We traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from North America to Europe. Europe and Asia share a long land border to the east, but Europe is conventionally understood as a separate continent—one of seven on Earth. Here’s something fitting for this trip: the ancient Greeks are the ones who created the concept of continents as we think of them today. In other words, we were traveling to the very place where the idea of “Europe” was invented!

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Greece

Greece sits at the southern tip of Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, reaching out into the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a relatively small country with around 10 million people, but almost no other place on Earth has had a bigger influence on the world we live in. Democracy, philosophy, theater, the Olympics, and even many of the words we use every day (like “geography,” “mathematics,” and “music”) all trace back to ancient Greece.

Two things define Greece’s geography: mountains and the sea. About 80% of the country is mountainous, and no matter where you stand in Greece, you’re never more than about 85 miles from the coast. Greece also has thousands of islands—estimates range from about 1,200 to 6,000 depending on how you count, though only a couple hundred are inhabited. In ancient times, all those mountains and islands kept communities separated from one another. Instead of one united country, ancient Greece developed as hundreds of independent city-states—cities that governed themselves like tiny countries, each with its own laws and army. The Greek word for city-state is polis, which is where we get words like “politics” and “police.” The most famous city-states were Athens and Sparta.

Even though the city-states were independent (and often fought each other!), the ancient Greeks shared a language, a religion with many gods, and traditions like the Olympic Games, first held in 776 BC to honor Zeus, the king of the gods.

Today, Greece is a democracy, a member of NATO and the European Union, and one of the most visited countries in the world. Its two biggest industries are shipping and tourism. The main religion is Greek Orthodox Christianity, a branch of Christianity that split from the Roman Catholic Church almost 1,000 years ago; you can see whitewashed Greek Orthodox churches and blue domes everywhere you go. A couple of Greek words to know: kalimera (pronunciation) means “good morning,” and efcharisto (pronunciation) means “thank you.”

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Athens

The capital and largest city of Greece is Athens, an ancient city that is home to more than 3 million people in its metropolitan area. (A metropolitan area is a major city plus its suburbs and nearby cities and towns. [Can you use your city or a nearby city as an example?]) People have lived in Athens continuously for more than 3,000 years. The city is named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. According to myth, Athena and Poseidon, the god of the sea, competed to become the city’s protector. Poseidon offered a spring of water; Athena offered an olive tree, giving food, oil, and wood. The people chose Athena’s gift—and olives are still one of Greece’s most important crops today!

Athens is often called the birthplace of democracy. In 508 BC, an Athenian leader named Cleisthenes (pronunciation) helped establish a system where citizens governed the city themselves. The word “democracy” comes from the Greek words demos (the people) and kratos (power or rule)—literally, “power of the people.” Athenian democracy was different from ours: instead of only voting for representatives, citizens gathered in person on a hillside to debate and vote directly on laws, and most government positions were assigned by lottery—like drawing names out of a hat! But it was also far from fair by our standards: only free adult men could be citizens. Women, enslaved people, and foreigners had no vote.

Athens was also home to some of history’s most famous thinkers: the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. A philosopher is someone who asks deep questions about life, knowledge, and how we should live (“philosophy” means “love of wisdom” in Greek). Their ideas are still studied in schools and universities today, nearly 2,500 years later.

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The Acropolis

Rising above the rooftops of Athens is the city’s most famous landmark: the Acropolis. The word means “high city” in Greek (akro = highest point, polis = city), and many Greek city-states had one—a rocky hill that served as a fortress and a home for temples. But when people say “the Acropolis,” they almost always mean this one.

On top stands the Parthenon, a massive marble temple built between 447 and 432 BC and dedicated to Athena. It was constructed during Athens’ “Golden Age,” when the statesman Pericles rebuilt the city after wars with the Persian Empire. The Parthenon has stood for nearly 2,500 years through wars, explosions, and earthquakes, and it is considered one of the greatest architectural achievements in human history. The Acropolis was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

Do you know what a UNESCO World Heritage Site is? It is a landmark or area designated by the United Nations for having cultural or historical significance. The program is intended to conserve sites for future generations. We’ll visit several more UNESCO-recognized places on this trip.

If you visit, the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill displays original sculptures from the temples—and you can see restoration workers on the hill carefully repairing the Parthenon using marble-carving techniques that are thousands of years old.

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The Aegean Sea & the Cyclades

Athens’ port city, Piraeus, sits on the Aegean Sea. The Aegean is the arm of the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Turkey, and it has been used by sailors, traders, and adventurers for more than 4,000 years. Homer’s famous epic poem the Odyssey—about the hero Odysseus and his ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War, evading monsters and angry gods—takes place on these very waters. An epic is a long poem that tells the story of a hero’s adventures; the Odyssey is about 12,000 lines long and was originally performed out loud from memory!

There is a group of about 30 inhabited islands (plus many more uninhabited ones) in the middle of the Aegean called the Cyclades (pronunciation). Their name comes from the Greek word kyklos, meaning “circle”—the same root as our word “cycle”—because the islands form a rough circle around the tiny sacred island of Delos.

These islands were also home to one of Europe’s earliest civilizations. The Cycladic civilization flourished here about 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age—the period when people first made tools and weapons from bronze. Cycladic artists carved elegant, minimalist marble figurines that look surprisingly modern and inspired 20th-century artists like Picasso.

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Tínos

Tinos (pronunciation) is a wonderful introduction to island life in the Cyclades. It is more natural and quieter than its famous neighbors—a place of rugged hillsides, hiking trails, surf beaches, and more than 40 traditional villages scattered across the mountains.

Tinos is one of the most important religious destinations in all of Greece. Its Church of Panagia Evangelistria, which overlooks the harbor, houses an icon of the Virgin Mary that many Greek Orthodox Christians believe can perform miracles. (An icon is a sacred painting of a holy figure, an important part of Orthodox Christian worship.) Every year, especially on August 15, thousands of pilgrims travel to Tinos—a pilgrimage is a journey made for religious reasons—and some devout visitors crawl on their hands and knees from the port all the way up the hill to the church as an act of faith.

The hillsides on Tinos are covered with hundreds of ornate stone towers decorated with geometric patterns. These are dovecotes—fancy pigeon houses! Venetian rulers introduced them centuries ago (pigeons were raised for food and fertilizer), and the islanders turned them into works of art.

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Dio Choria

On Tinos, we visited the village of Dio Choria, whose name simply means “Two Villages” in Greek, because it formed when two neighboring settlements grew together. Perched about 1,500 feet up the mountainside, it’s a maze of whitewashed houses, marble-paved lanes, arched passageways, and spring-fed fountains. You can sip coffee in the village square while looking out over terraced hillsides all the way down to the Aegean Sea—a view you’ll never forget!

Villages like this were built high in the hills on purpose. For centuries, pirates raided the Aegean islands, so islanders built their homes inland and uphill, out of sight from the sea, with narrow winding streets that were easy to defend and confusing to strangers.

— Stop 9 —

Volax

We also visited Volax, one of the strangest and most wonderful landscapes in Greece. The village sits in the heart of Tinos on a high plateau surrounded by hundreds of enormous, rounded granite boulders—some as big as houses—scattered across the fields as if a giant had been playing marbles. Geologists explain the boulders as the result of millions of years of erosion, where weathering slowly rounded off blocks of granite. But local legends say these were the boulders hurled during the mythical battle between the Greek gods and the Giants!

Volax is also famous for its basket weavers. For generations, villagers have woven baskets by hand from reeds and wicker, and a few craftspeople still practice the art today.

— Stop 10 —

Pirgos

Our third stop on Tinos was Pirgos (also spelled Pyrgos), the largest village on Tinos and one of the most artistic places in Greece. Pirgos is the center of Tinian marble craftsmanship—the art of carving marble—which has been passed down from master to apprentice here for centuries. Marble is a hard, beautiful stone formed when limestone is squeezed and heated deep in the Earth; Greece’s mountains are full of it, and it has been the material of choice for Greek temples and statues since ancient times.

In Pirgos, marble is everywhere: doorframes, fountains, bus stops, even street signs are carved with flowers, ships, birds, and cypress trees. The village has been the birthplace of many of Greece’s most famous sculptors and painters, and its School of Fine Arts still trains young artists today. In 2015, UNESCO added Tinian marble craftsmanship to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage—a special list that protects not places, but living traditions, skills, and knowledge that are passed from generation to generation.

When Athens needs someone to help restore the Parthenon on the Acropolis, they call on marble carvers trained in the Tinos tradition, who repair the 2,500-year-old temple using many of the same hand techniques the ancient builders used. The skills of this little village are keeping ancient Greece standing!

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Mykonos

Another island in the Cyclades is Mykonos (pronunciation), Greece’s most famous cosmopolitan island—”cosmopolitan” means a place full of people and influences from all over the world. According to myth, the island is named for Mykonos, a grandson of the god Apollo. Legend also says the great hero Herakles (also known by his Roman name, Hercules) defeated the Giants here, and that their petrified bodies became the island’s huge granite rocks.

Today Mykonos draws travelers from every corner of the globe with its beaches, shops, and famous nightlife. Its main town is a gorgeous tangle of narrow, whitewashed lanes—deliberately maze-like, once again, to confuse pirates and to block the island’s powerful winds. Keep an eye out for the resident pelicans! Ever since a wounded pelican named Petros was nursed back to health here in the 1950s, pelicans have been the beloved mascots of the island.

— Stop 12 —

Little Venice

The most photographed sight on Mykonos is the row of round, white, thatch-roofed windmills standing on a hill above the harbor. Windmills like these were built beginning in the 16th century, and they were the island’s economic engine: the Cyclades are famously windy, and the mills used that free energy to grind wheat and barley into flour, much of it sold to sailing ships passing between Europe and Asia. Before engines and electricity, wind literally powered these islands—the same idea behind the wind turbines we build today.

Just below the windmills is the neighborhood called Little Venice, where rows of old houses are built right at the water’s edge, their wooden balconies hanging out over the waves. They were built in the 18th century, reportedly by wealthy sea captains and merchants, and they reminded travelers of Venice, Italy—the famous city built on water.

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Delos

Just a couple of miles off the coast of Mykonos lies a tiny, uninhabited, rocky island that was once one of the most important places in the ancient world: Delos. According to Greek mythology, Delos is the birthplace of the twin gods Apollo, god of light, music, and prophecy, and Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt. The myth says their mother, Leto, was being chased by the jealous goddess Hera, who forbade every land on Earth from giving her shelter. Delos—then a floating island not anchored to the sea floor—took her in, and after Apollo’s birth the island was fixed in place forever. Because of this story, Delos became sacred to all Greeks.

Delos was considered so holy that, in ancient times, no one was allowed to be born or to die there—the sick and expectant mothers were ferried to a neighboring island. For centuries, pilgrims from every Greek city-state came here to worship. After the Persian Wars, Athens and its allies even founded their great alliance here in 478 BC, called the Delian League, and kept its treasury on the island. Later, Delos became one of the busiest trading ports in the Mediterranean, with merchants from Italy, Egypt, and Syria living side by side.

Today the entire island is an archaeological site; an archaeologist is a scientist who studies the past by carefully digging up and examining what people left behind; archaeologists have been excavating Delos for more than 150 years, and much of it is still buried. Delos is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since 1990). Its most famous monument is the Terrace of the Lions—a row of snarling marble lions carved around 600 BC and dedicated to Apollo by the people of Naxos.

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Naxos

Naxos (pronunciation) is the largest and greenest island in the Cyclades. Unlike its drier neighbors, Naxos has mountains tall enough to catch rain clouds, so its valleys are full of olive groves, vineyards, citrus orchards, and potato farms—it’s the most self-sufficient island in the Cyclades, meaning it can grow most of its own food.

Naxos punches far above its weight in history. Around 500 BC, the ancient historian Herodotus described it as the most prosperous island in Greece. Its wealth came from two rocks: brilliant white Naxian marble, prized for statues and temples across the Greek world, and emery, an extremely hard mineral the ancients used like sandpaper to polish marble sculptures. Naxian sculptors carved the marble lions of Delos and giant statues called kouroi—two unfinished ones, each longer than a school bus, still lie in the island’s ancient quarries where workers abandoned them over 2,500 years ago.

In mythology, Naxos was the childhood home of Zeus himself, and the favorite island of Dionysus (pronunciation), the god of wine and celebration, who according to myth blessed the island with its fertile vineyards. This is also where, in the famous myth of the Labyrinth, the hero Theseus stopped after escaping the Minotaur’s maze on Crete—and where he left the princess Ariadne, who had helped him survive, sleeping on the beach.

— Stop 15 —

The Portara (Temple of Apollo)

When you arrive in Naxos harbor, you are greeted by the island’s most iconic sight: a colossal free-standing marble doorway on a little islet, framing nothing but sky and sea. This is the Portara, which means “great door,” and it is the entrance to a Temple of Apollo that was never finished.

Around 530 BC, the ruler of Naxos, Lygdamis (pronunciation), began building what he intended to be one of the grandest temples in all of Greece. (His title was tyrant—but in ancient Greece, a “tyrant” simply meant a ruler who took power outside the normal rules, not necessarily a cruel one. Our modern meaning came later.) When Lygdamis fell from power, construction stopped forever. Over the centuries, most of the unfinished temple’s marble was carried away to build other structures, but the doorway was simply too big to move: it stands about 20 feet tall, and each of its marble pieces weighs up to 20 tons—about as much as three African elephants! How did the ancient Greeks lift stones like that without any machines but ramps, ropes, levers, and muscle? Engineers still study and admire how they did it.

— Stop 16 —

Mount Zas & the Cave of Zeus

Rising from the center of Naxos is Mount Zas, at about 3,290 feet the highest peak in all the Cyclades. “Zas” is a local form of the name Zeus—and according to tradition, this mountain is where Zeus, the king of the Greek gods and god of the sky and thunder, was raised as a baby. The myth says Zeus’s father, the Titan Cronus, swallowed his children out of fear that one would overthrow him, so baby Zeus was hidden away in a cave—and Naxians say it was Zas Cave, partway up this mountain. Inside the cave, archaeologists have found evidence that people used it as far back as the Stone Age, and it later became a place of worship for Zeus.

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Temple of Demeter

Scattered across the inland valleys of Naxos are treasures from even earlier eras. One of them is the Temple of Demeter, built around 530 BC to honor the goddess of grain and the harvest—fittingly placed in the middle of Naxos’ most fertile farmland.

This temple was one of the very first buildings in Greece made almost entirely of marble. The architects were incredibly clever—they designed the temple with subtle tricks of proportion and even used translucent marble roof tiles, so that soft light could actually glow through the ceiling into the space below. Over the centuries the temple was transformed into a Christian church, which is actually part of why some of it survived at all, and today archaeologists have carefully restored a portion of it so that visitors can walk up and see the elegant columns standing against the blue Greek sky, just as people did thousands of years ago.

— Stop 18 —

Santorini

One last island to show you is Santorini (pronunciation). Its official Greek name is Thira; “Santorini” comes from “Santa Irini” (Saint Irene), the name Venetian sailors gave it centuries ago. Nothing quite prepares you for the sight from the ferry: sheer cliffs of red, brown, and black rock rising a thousand feet straight out of the sea, with villages of white houses clinging to the edge.

Those cliffs are the walls of a volcano; Santorini isn’t just an island with a volcano on it—it is part of the crescent-shaped rim of the volcano!

— Stop 19 —

The Santorini Caldera

Santorini is one of a few islands that form a huge, sea-filled crater. The volcano is still active (its last eruption was in 1950), and it completely explains everything unusual about the island: the black-sand and red-sand beaches, the cliffside villages, even the unusually sweet tomatoes and grapes that grow in the volcanic soil.

The giant sea-filled crater is called a caldera—a huge basin formed when a volcano erupts so violently that it empties its underground magma chamber and the ground above collapses inward. Santorini’s caldera is enormous: roughly 7.5 by 4.3 miles across, with cliffs rising up to 1,000 feet above the water.

It was created by one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history. Around 1600 BC—about 3,600 years ago, during the Bronze Age—the volcano exploded with unimaginable force, blasting out an unimaginable amount of rock and ash, burying the island many meters deep, and sending tsunamis (giant sea waves) crashing across the Aegean. Scientists call it the Minoan eruption, because at the time the region was dominated by the Minoans, a seafaring civilization centered on the island of Crete to the south. The eruption and its aftermath damaged Minoan towns and trade, and some historians think it contributed to that civilization’s decline. Some scholars even suspect the catastrophe inspired the Greek philosopher Plato’s famous legend of Atlantis, the glorious island civilization said to have vanished into the sea.

Buried under all that ash, archaeologists discovered an entire Bronze Age town. At Akrotiri, on the island’s southern tip, excavations since 1967 have uncovered two- and three-story houses, paved streets, indoor plumbing (3,600 years ago!), beautiful pottery, and stunningly colorful frescoes of dolphins, monkeys, flowers, and ships. Akrotiri is often called the “Pompeii of the Aegean,” after the famous Roman city buried by Mount Vesuvius, but with one big difference: no human remains have been found at Akrotiri. The volcano gave warnings—earthquakes and small ash falls—and the townspeople appear to have evacuated in time. You can walk through the excavated town today under a protective roof, and see its treasures in the island’s museums.

— Stop 20 —

Fira to Oia

One of the most popular things to do in Santorini is walk the caldera-rim trail from Fira (pronunciation), the island’s main town, to the village of Oia at the island’s northern tip. The hike is about 6.5 miles and takes three to four hours, passing through the cliff-top villages of Firostefani and Imerovigli along the way. The path changes constantly—sometimes a sidewalk, sometimes cobblestones, sometimes a simple dirt trail over volcanic ridges—and the entire time, the caldera drops below on one side while the open Aegean stretches away on the other.

Walking the rim, you’re literally hiking along the edge of that ancient eruption—every step is on layers of hardened ash and lava from 3,600 years ago and eruptions long before.

— Stop 21 —

Oia

The walk ends in Oia (pronunciation—it’s pronounced “EE-ah”), the village on the northern tip of Santorini that appears on more postcards, posters, and screensavers than perhaps any other place in Greece. Its white houses are stacked down the cliffside, with blue-domed churches and its own set of windmills catching the Aegean wind.

Oia’s beauty has a hard-earned history. In the 1800s it was a prosperous town of sea captains and merchant sailors—many of its finest houses were built with shipping wealth. Then in 1956, a powerful earthquake devastated the town and much of the island, and many residents moved away. In the decades since, Oia has been lovingly restored, and many of its cave houses—rooms carved directly into the soft volcanic rock, naturally cool in summer and warm in winter—are now homes, shops, and small hotels.

Every evening, crowds gather along Oia’s walls and stairways for its world-famous sunset over the caldera.

— Stop 22 —

Overview

Our journey through Athens and the Cyclades—Tinos, Mykonos, Naxos, and Santorini—took us across seas that sailors have crossed for thousands of years, to islands where mythology, ancient history, and modern life are layered on top of each other everywhere you look. We saw the doorway of an unfinished temple of Apollo, the mountain where Zeus was said to have been raised, the rim of a volcano that shaped the ancient world, and villages where crafts have been passed down for generations.

A few themes emerged from our journey:

• The birthplace of big ideas: Democracy, philosophy, theater, the Olympics, and much of our vocabulary began in Greece. Traveling here means visiting the birthplace of ideas we use every single day—and discovering that the ancient version (like choosing leaders by lottery!) was often surprisingly different from ours.
• Geography shapes history: Greece’s mountains and islands kept ancient communities separate, creating hundreds of independent city-states. The sea brought people together through trade and travel. And volcanic eruptions left their mark on entire civilizations.
• Mythology is everywhere: Nearly every place we visited had a story—Apollo born on Delos, Zeus raised on Naxos, Giants’ boulders on Tinos, Atlantis’s connection to Santorini. Myths were how the Greeks explained their world, and they still capture the interest of visitors and anyone interested in ancient Greece.
• Living traditions: From the marble carvers of Pirgos restoring the Parthenon, to basket weavers in Volax, to pilgrims crawling to the church of Tinos, Greece’s heritage isn’t just ruins—it’s skills, customs, and faith still being passed from generation to generation.
• Resilience: These islands have endured pirate raids, foreign rule, catastrophic eruptions, and earthquakes—and each time, the islanders rebuilt. The whitewashed villages we admire today are monuments to people who refused to give up on their home.