Saint Anthony

You climb the path as the light begins to soften, and the air smells of thyme and warm stone. Behind you, Marpissa spreads out with its white houses; ahead of you, only sky. And at the summit, alone and commanding, the Monastery of Saint Anthony waits where it has waited for centuries — on the eastern edge of the hill known as “Kefalos,” like a sentinel that never abandoned its post.

There are places you don’t simply visit. You listen to them. Kefalos is one of them.

The hill that held an entire island

Before you reach the monastery, you pass through the ruins of a castle. Its outer wall was built around 1500 by Niccolò I Sommaripa, the Venetian ruler of Paros — yet the site had stood guard much earlier. Archaeological finds attest to fortifications here as far back as the early 13th century, and the Florentine priest Cristoforo Buondelmonti, wandering the Aegean in the early 15th century, recorded it alive and in use.

Stand at this spot and you understand why. From here you can see the sea on three sides. No boat approached eastern Paros without being caught by the sentinel’s eye. Kefalos was not merely a stronghold. It was the island itself, condensed into a single rock.

The last page of Frankish rule

Every stone here carries a date written in blood. In 1537, the admiral of the Ottoman fleet, the formidable Hayreddin Barbarossa, brought his ships to Paros. After a fierce battle at the summit of Kefalos, he subdued the Frankish ruler Bernardo Sagredo and took the island.

It was the end of an era. Here was written the last page of Venetian rule in Paros. And it was a harsh ending: six thousand Parians met a wretched fate that year.

Today the wind passes through the broken battlements, and as you rest your hand on the wall, you feel you are touching a wound the land never fully closed — only tempered with silence and thyme.

Stones do not speak, but up here you learn to listen to them: every crack is a name that time did not manage to erase.Parian oral tradition

Ten chapels and a church that holds a record

Among the ruins, the hill conceals a scattered treasure: about ten half-ruined chapels, dotted along the slope like prayer beads someone set down mid-prayer. You step into one, step out, find the next further up, half-swallowed by wild grasses.

The largest, restored today, is dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin. And it holds a distinction few know: according to an inscription on the lintel above the entrance, it was built in 1410 — making it the oldest dated church in the whole of Paros.

You stand beneath that lintel and wonder: how many hands passed through here before yours? How many generations climbed this very path, with different worries and the same sky?

The gap in history — and what memory leaves unsaid

History does not always tell everything. For the Monastery of Saint Anthony, from 1597 to 1642, the sources fall silent. Nearly half a century remains blank — a pause in the place’s memory, like a page that came loose from the book.

And yet, this gap has its own charm. It leaves you room to imagine the monks who lit the oil lamp, the shepherds who climbed with their flocks, the sailors who looked up from below at the light on the summit. History here is not a closed box. It is an invitation.

A sunset you owe yourself

Stay until the day’s end. When the sun sets behind Naxos, the entire eastern front of Paros is bathed in gold — the same gold as the island’s famed marble, lychnites, which once traveled from this island across the ancient world.

Below spread Marpissa, Prodromos, and Lefkes with their bell towers. Further off, Chrysi Akti gleams. And you stand up there, between a castle that fell and a church that endured, understanding something simple: that this rock is not the past. It is an appointment that Paros has been keeping for you, for five centuries now.