The Kastro wall
Temple column drums laid horizontally into the castle's masonry.
Olaf Tausch โ CC BY 3.0 ยท Zde โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Jean Housen โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Holger Uwe Schmitt โ CC BY-SA 4.0
**Free and always open.** โ **The seafront is busy with ferry traffic, cars and cafรฉs** โ do not judge Parikia by it; **go into the lanes behind** and you will find an entirely different town. โ **The lanes are uneven paving, narrow** and partly stepped โ hard with a pushchair. โ **Cars are banned** in most of the old town. โ **It fills sharply when the big ferries arrive** โ and Paros is a **major ferry interchange** in the Cyclades, so movement is heavy all day. โ **The Kastro is free and always open** โ a ten-minute walk up from the harbour. โ **The Archaeological Museum closes one day a week** โ check. โ **The inner-lane restaurants are clearly cheaper and better** than the front. โ The best hours are **early morning and evening**. Allow **two to three hours**.
๐ฌ Ask on WhatsAppOpen in Google Maps โ**The capital and main port of Paros** โ and one of the first things you notice off the ferry is that it is **a real town**, not a tourist front. Behind the busy seafront runs an **old town** of white paved lanes, their paving edges picked out in white lines โ a genuine Cycladic habit: the joints are limewashed each year, so the alleys appear drawn in outline. At the top is the **Kastro**: a 13th-century Venetian castle built โ and this is the striking part โ **from the stone of an ancient Greek temple**: in its wall you see **marble column drums** laid horizontally like bricks, and carved blocks reused. It is the clearest example in the Cyclades of a temple recycled into a fortress. The town also holds **Panagia Ekatontapiliani**, the **Archaeological Museum** and ancient cemeteries. โ Its seafront is **loud and crowded** โ the old town behind it is far quieter.
Temple column drums laid horizontally into the castle's masonry.
White paving with limewashed joints through the old town.
A white windmill that has become Parikia's landmark on arrival.
Parikia, 84400 Paros, Greece
**Because it was the fastest and cheapest way โ and it was entirely normal in its time.** โ **The practical logic**: building a fortress needs **large, squared, cut blocks**. Quarrying and transporting stone takes years and money. **An abandoned temple nearby is a ready-made store**: precisely cut blocks, solid column drums, marble to hand. So it was used as it stood. โ **The archaeological term is *spolia*** โ reusing older architectural elements in new construction, and it was a **very common practice** across the Mediterranean: you see it in the churches of Rome, the mosques of Anatolia and the castles of the islands. โ **Sometimes it carried a symbolic meaning too**: using a pagan temple's stone in a Christian building or a fortress announced the new order's victory over the old. โ **At Parikia it is unusually visible**: **the column drums are laid horizontally in the wall**, so you see them from the street with no explanation needed โ which is what makes this Kastro a textbook example.
**Naxos for landscape and interior, Paros for connections and life โ and many people do both, since they are 45 minutes apart by ferry.** โ **Paros** is the **Cyclades ferry hub** โ with routes to almost every island, making it **the easiest logistically** and an ideal base for island-hopping. Its two towns, **Parikia** and **Naoussa**, have evening life and a wider choice of restaurants, its beaches are good, and the island is **small enough to cover easily**. โ Its drawbacks: **busier and more touristy**, with no mountainous interior to speak of. โ **Naxos** is **larger, more fertile and more varied** โ mountains, marble villages, temples and the best sandy beaches in the Cyclades, at lower prices, with a genuine farming life. โ Its drawbacks: **quieter evenings** and fewer ferry routes. โ **The rule**: a week on one island with children or a car โ **Naxos**. Hopping between several islands, or a short trip โ **Paros**. โ **The best answer**: **both** โ the ferry between them is short and frequent.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet โ be the first.