Ano Syros, the Catholic hill

When the Venetians took the Cyclades after 1204, they built their town on Syros on this hill, high enough to see pirates coming and steep enough to defend. The houses were packed together so that their outer walls made a rampart, with the lanes running under arches between them. On the summit they built a church to Saint George, San Giorgio, now the Catholic cathedral of Syros.

Under the Ottomans the islanders kept their faith under the protection of the kings of France, and the Capuchin and Jesuit monks who settled on the hill ran schools and kept records. That protection is why Syros stayed out of the war of 1821, and why refugees could build Ermoupoli on the shore below. For a century the two towns, Catholic on the hill and Orthodox by the sea, lived side by side. Today they are one town, and on Syros Catholics and Orthodox keep Easter on the same day.

Markos Vamvakaris was born in Ano Syros in 1905, the son of a poor Catholic family, and left for Piraeus as a boy, where he became the great bouzouki player and singer of rebetiko. His song Frangosyriani, about a Catholic girl of Syros, is still sung all over Greece. There is a small museum to him in the town and a square with his statue, and on summer nights you may still hear his songs from a taverna terrace.