Windmills of Mykonos
Whitewashed stone windmills on a hilltop, sails once trimmed by hand to grind grain in the meltemi wind.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Windmills of Mykonos starts with an absence: the sound of turning sails that filled this hilltop for three hundred years and has since gone quiet. It follows the Venetian millers who built here in the fifteen hundreds to catch the meltemi, and the odd skill of trimming twelve cotton sails like a ship's rigging to keep the grindstone at exactly the right speed. You'll hear how farmers hauled their own grain up the hill and carried flour back down, and how the twice-baked ship's biscuit made here once fed sailors on the Venice trade route. Stand facing into the wind while you listen, the same wind the millers spent their working lives reading.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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