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Modern Description: The road south out of Chora descends to the coast through the area known as Alónia (‘threshing floors') where the produce of the island's fertile western flank was processed in mills driven by the water of the Polypoúdi stream. A track parallel to its course to the west passes beside the church of Aghios Giorgios and leads to the mouth of the watercourse at the shore. Here, at Mikró Vouní, the island's oldest settlement of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages occupied the top of the mound just north of what would have been a small natural harbour. Evidence of an earliest phase of settlement dating from the end of the 6th millennium BC has been uncovered; by the 3rd millennium BC a typical, Aegean, proto-urban community of around 500 individuals had formed. Amongst the finds from the site are a number of Minoan clay tablets of the 19th or 18th century BC, providing important evidence of the extent of Cretan trade in metals in the area.

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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