Travel

Mykonos - Beyond the Windmills of Mykonos

By deTraci Regula, About.com Guide

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Beyond the Windmill

Mykonos Windmills

The famous row of windmills on Mykonos is the iconic symbol of the island - possibly because they are less subject to censorship than some of the other iconic images of Mykonos, the nude beaches and wild parties on the sand.

But Mykonos is much more than just spinning sails and a renowned nightlife. In many ways, Greece owes its thriving modern tourism to the impact Mykonos made on the collective imagination of the 1960s, when jet travel was still new and "jet-setters" discovered the once-sleepy island.

While the "os" ending of the name indicates an ancient origin, Mykonos was overshadowed in antiquity by nearby Delos, the heart of the Delian Confederacy, a sacred spot to the rest of the Greek world - and the site of one of the biggest slave markets in the Aegean, a fact that sometimes is omitted from the usual brochures. Mykonos was inhabited during that time, but its neighbor got most of the attention from what might have been called the "fast ship set" rather than the "jet-setters".

So in many ways, Mykonos is an ancient Greek island which is enjoying its golden age right now, with city-sized ships making it a prime port of call and hundreds of thousands of visitors making their memories of their Greek summer.