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Modern Description: The eastern border of the headland, stretching from the basilicas to the southern point, is one huge ancient quarry of fine, white, crystalline marble. Aliki's marble is slightly less compact than the dolomitic white marble which was quarried in the north of the island and was generally preferred for sculpture; the marble here can sometimes tend towards an off-white or a very pale grey in colour, and as a consequence it was used more for building and decoration. When Seneca mockingly observes the fashion for using Thasian marble to line swimming-pools and baths in houses around Rome (Epistulae LXXXVI), it is the stone from here to which he is referring.
It is worth persevering – up and down over artificial mounds of accumulated marble debris – to the southern tip of the promontory. The strange and unworldly landscape is testimony to the fact that two hundred metres of the headland have simply vanished and been shipped away in craft to all points of the Greek world and, above all, to Ancient Rome to satisfy her latterly insatiable appetite for fine materials. Over a period of twelve hundred years from shortly after 600 BC to after 600 AD, a quantity perhaps approaching one quarter of a million cubic metres of marble have been quarried here. The hill has been cut down to water level, leaving a low barrier of rock at the southern tip to act as breakwater: around the perimeter, loading bays and moorings for the barges are visible at certain points, as are carved slots for the fixing of winching machinery and pulleys. The surface of the whole area is covered with evidence of the stone-cutters' tools – the striations of the pick and chisel, and the regular perforations of the running drill holes. Only a few column drums and bases have somehow been left behind by accident, everything else has been loaded and shipped. The sea scarcely floods the area and salt easily forms by evaporation of the sea water: the name ‘Alyki' (related to ‘als', meaning ‘salt') probably derives from this.

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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