Naxos under Ottoman rule
The last duke of the Aegean: Josph Nasi
In 1566, the last Venetian Duke of Naxos, Jakob Crispi, was deposed and imprisoned by the Turks, to whom he had become a tributary since the raids by the Turkish corsair and naval admira…
Paleolithic and Mesolithic
Until recently it was assumed that the Aegean islands were inhabited by humans only in the Neolithic age. One of the earliest proofs that humans had reached the Cyclades were the findings of obsidian from the island of Milos in…
The Roman epoch
Around the middle of the second century BC the different areas of Greece (Macedonia, the rest of the Greek mainland, the Aegean islands and finally Asia Minor) were successively subdued by the Romans and incorporated into the R…
The Hellenistic epoch
The Hellenistic epoch covers the period from 336 BC, starting with the murder of the Macedonian king Phillip II, the father of Alexander the Great, till the beginning of the 1st century BC. The most important event of first ten…
The Classical epoch
The Classical Epoch includes the 5th and 4th centuries BC (about 500 BC to 340 BC), the Golden Age of Greek antiquity. I outine here only the fate of the island of Naxos during this epoch, about which we learn a lot from ancien…
The Archaic epoch
The Archaic epoch covers the 7th and 6th centuries BC. During this period a remarkable cultural development took place in the Greek region, i.e. on the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor, and …
The Mycenaean epoch
The Late Bronze age in the Cyclades is called Mycenaean (= Late Helladic) epoch (about 1700 to 1150 BC). The most important centres of the Mycenaean epoch were on the Peloponnese and the southern Greek mainland (Attica, Boeotia…
Naxos in the Byzantine era
As far as Greek history is concerned, most people only think of Ancient Greece, and with good reasons, since Greece developed in antiquity (and before) a very important culture, that not only profoundly influenced the neighbour…
The Geometric epoch
In the 12th century BC, the Dorian tribes from the north began to migrate to the Greek mainland, leading to armed conflicts, social upheaval and population shifts. Tribes such as the Ionians, who had settled in these regions, n…
The Minoan epoch
In 2000 BC the characteristic Cycladic culture (3rd millennium BC) came to an end and the Minoans achieved the dominance in the Aegean. Accordingly, in the Cyclades the following epoch, the Middle Bronze age, is called Minoan e…
Naxos under the Venetians
IIn 1204, during the 4th Crusade, the Franks and Venetians conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, because the Emperor of Byzantium, who had called them to support him agains his enemies, was unable to pa…
The Cycladic culture
In the third millennium BC a remarkable culture developed on the Cyclades, the so-called Cycladic culture, which had an important centre on Naxos. It was one of the first cultures in Europe to take the step into the Bronze age:…
The history of Naxos
The history of the Cyclades and of Naxos in particular is exceptionally interesting. The first humans reached the Cyclades already in the Palaeolithic age.
