Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

82 HOME LIFE IN HELLASmade up of antique remains. There is scarcelya house but displays fragments of sculpturedmarble. A ruined tower is built of drums ofThe greatcolumns and the gradines of a theatre.church has a pagan altar beneath the Christianone, and the principal portal is flanked by marblesatyrs. Judging from the numbers of ancientcemeteries, Paros must formerly have had a muchlarger population than the nine thousand it nowcontains. Antiparos, separated from it by anarrow channel, is remarkable only for its vaststalactitic cavern. Both islands are bleak inaspect, though Paros has vast vineyards.Pleasant to behold are Andros and Tenos, andas they are in the track of steamers passing betweenthe Mediterranean and the Dardanelles,travellers not bound for the Cyclades see more ofthem than of other islands. Both are well wooded,and Andros especially is copiously watered. Theyare fertile and populous : Tenos has 12,500 soulsand Andros 19,000, the largest population ofany single member of the group. After Syra,it is also the wealthiest. Mention has been madeof its shipowners ;there are also many well-to-dotillers of the soil. As neither island has practicallyseen anything of the Turks—Tenos wasVenetian until 1718—their character is Westernrather than Oriental. The architecture is Italian.Andros isstudded with square Venetian towers,still used as dwellings. The stables are on theground-floor, the living-rooms above, and the