Chora, the hill town that never sleeps in August

Chora stands where the ancient city of Ios stood. In the Middle Ages the Venetians, who took the island in 1207 as part of the Duchy of Naxos, built a castle on the summit, and the houses packed tightly around it with their outer walls joined to form a defensive ring against the pirates of the Aegean. Ios was a notorious pirate haven in those centuries, so much so that it was nicknamed 'Little Malta'. The church of Panagia Gremniotissa stands on the rock of the Kastro today; the story goes that its icon floated across from Crete on a raft and came ashore below the village.

For most of its history the town lived from goats, cheese, barley and the sea. Then, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, young travellers from northern Europe found the island, slept on the beaches and stayed for weeks, and Ios became the hippie island of the Aegean. The Ios Club opened on the hill on the western edge of Chora in 1968, one of the first sunset bars in the Mediterranean; Disco 69, a few steps from the main square, followed in 1979.

Today Chora has two lives. In the morning the lanes are swept, the bakeries open, old women sit outside the churches and you can walk up to the windmills and the Odysseas Elytis Theatre, built of local stone and marble above the town, in near silence. From about eleven at night the area around the main square fills with music, cheap shots and crowds in their twenties, and stays that way until four or five. The two Choras meet at breakfast.

The town keeps its own feasts. On 15 August the icon of the Gremniotissa is carried through the lanes. Ios is said to have 365 churches and chapels, one for every day of the year, and many of them are in or around Chora, from tiny whitewashed chapels to the cathedral of the Evangelismos on its square.