What Is Folegandros Known For?

Folegandros carries the name of a mythological figure, though even that story competes with a second, more practical explanation tied to the island's own rock.

Folegandros is known first for its name, generally traced to a son of King Minos, the legendary ruler of Crete, who according to mythology led early settlers to the island. Ancient coins bearing his image, discovered on the island and issued by its local municipality, lend real support to that version of the story. A competing theory holds that Phoenician sailors called the island phelekgundari, meaning rocky, a fitting description given the steep, bare cliffs that define its terrain.

The island is equally known for the Kastro quarter of Chora, the medieval settlement built in 1215 by Venetian ruler Marco Sanudo in the years following the Fourth Crusade, specifically to protect residents from pirate raids. Its two-story houses, with outer walls forming a continuous defensive perimeter, remain inhabited today, making it one of the oldest continuously lived-in sections of any Cycladic capital, perched roughly 200 meters above the sea.

Folegandros also carries a real history as a place of exile, first under Roman rule, and again in the 20th century, when the dictatorship governing Greece from 1936 to 1941 used the island to hold political prisoners, a chapter of Greek history the island shares with several other remote Aegean islands from that same period.

The Church of Panagia, reached by a winding path above Chora, adds another layer still, built directly over the site of an earlier ancient sanctuary dedicated to Artemis and Apollo, giving the island's most recognized landmark a religious history that stretches back well before Christianity arrived, connecting Folegandros through ferry routes to both Santorini and Milos.