Naxos
Naxos is the largest island (428 km²) in the Cyclades island group which lies between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean Sea. The island was the center of archaic Cycladic culture, part of classical Greek culture and is part of Greece today. It is a popular tourist destination with easily accessible ruins. One set of ruins is what is left of a temple built on a rocky beach. Long ago there was an earthquake sending most of the temple into the sea. Still standing however are two columns with a single lintel across them. The remains of the structure resting in the sea can be seen from the shore and explored by swimmers.Naxos has many very beautiful beaches, like the ones at Agia Anna, Agios Prokopios, Alikos, Castraki, Mikri Vigla, Plaka and Agios Georgios at Hora, the capital of the island, which has 7,000 inhabitants.
Naxos is famous as the most fertile island of the Cyclades. It has a good supply of water, in an area where water is usually inadequate. Mount Zas ("Zeus", 1004 meters) is the highest peak in the Aegean Sea, and it tends to trap the clouds, permitting greater rainfall.
Mythic Naxos
Homer mentions Naxos under the name "Dia" still the "island of the Goddess." According to mythology, in the Heroic Age before the Trojan War, on this island Theseus had abandoned princess Ariadne, daughter of Minos, king of Crete, after she helped him kill the Minotaur and escape from the Labyrinth. Dionysus, god of the island and protector of wine, festivities and cheerfulness, met her and fell in love with her. But Ariadne, unable to bear the separation from Theseus, killed herself.
Greek and Byzantine Naxos
During the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Naxos dominated a wide commerce in the Cyclades. (more text to come)
The Dukes of Naxos
In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, with a Latin Emperor under the influence of the Venetians established at Constantinople, the Venetian Marco Sanudo, who was a cousin of doge Enrico Dandolo, arranged for the loan of eight galleys from the Venetian Arsenal. Sanudo and his latter-day Argonauts cast anchor in the harbor of Potamidides, in the southwest of the island, and largely captured the island. The Orthodox Naxiotes did not give in easily: they holed up in the inland Greek fortress of Apalyros/Apalire, which fell to Sanudo after five or six weeks' siege, despite the succor rendered to the Greeks by the Genoese, who were none too happy to be excluded from Aegean trade by a nest of such officially-sanctioned Venetian pirates. With Naxos in hand in 1210, Sanudo and his brigand adventurers soon conquered Melos and the rest of the islands of the Cyclades, and he established himself as Duke of Naxia, or Duke of the Aegean, with his headquarters at Naxos. Sanudo rebuilt a strong fortress and divided the island into 56 provinces, which he shared out as feudal fiefs among the leaders of his men, most of whom were working on spec and apparently paid their own expenses. The Duchy of Naxos remained a powerful force on the largest and richest island, the strategic key to the Cyclades (the "Archipelago"). The conqueror himself ruled as Duke Marcos I for twenty years (1207-27) surrounded in the Archipelago by Latin seigneurs in more than than two dozen islands in the Aegean, for which some of them did homage to the Duke of Naxos, and some directly to the Frankish Emperor at Constantinople. The Annals of the Latin Archipelago are filled with the names of the Sanudo and Dandolo, Ghisi, Crispo and Sommaripa, Venier and Quirini, Barozzi and Gozzadini. In 1383, the Crispo led an armed insurrection and overthrew Sanudo's heirs as Dukes of Archipelago. Under the Crispo dukes, social order and agriculture decayed, and piracy flourished.
In the islands, as on the mainland, the substitution of a Latin feudalism caused little disruption to the Greek islanders, who were familiar with the rights of a land-owner class under the similar Byzantine system of the pronoia. Certain Latin feudal rights survived in the island of Naxos and elsewhere until they were abrogated in 1720 by the Turks. Twenty-one dukes of the two dynasties ruled the Archipelago, successively as vassals of the Latin Emperors at Constantinople, of the Villehardouin dynasty of princes of Achaia, of the Angevins of Naples, and after 1418 of the Serenissima. Before the last Latin Christian duke, Jacopo IV Crispo, was deposed in 1566 by Sultan Selim II, he was already paying the Sultan tribute. The Sultan's appointed representative, the last Duke of Archipelago (1566-79) was a Portuguese Marrano, Joseph Nasi. The Sultan's policy was based on the expectation that a foreign Jew would not be able to win support from the Orthodox Naxiotes to establish an independent rule. Joseph Nasi was married to his cousin, Dona Reyna, an interpid heiress whose family had fled Spain with their fortune at the Expulsion. At Joseph's death in 1579, the Sultan expropriated much of his widow's wealth except for the 90,000 dinars stipulated in her ketubah (marriage contract). With this inheritance, Dona Reyna established a Hebrew press, first in her palatial residence in Belvedere, then in a suburb of Constantinople.
Even then Latin Christian rule was not entirely extinguished, for the Bolonese Gozzadini survived as lords of Siphnos other little islands in the Cyclades until 1617, and the island of Tenos remained Venetian until 1714.
Ottoman Naxos, 1564 - 1821
The Ottoman administration remained essentially in the hands of the familiar island Venetians: the Porte's concern was satisfied in the returns of taxes. Very few Turks ever settled on Naxos, and Turkish influence on the island is slight. The Turkish sovereignty lasted until 1821 when the islands revolted and Naxos finally became a member of the Greek state in 1832.