Art And Culture in Laurium

Lavrio's cultural line is double: its own ancient layer, plus Milos, which is nearer from here than from anywhere else on the mainland. The town's own layer is industrial. In the fifth century BC the silver of Laurium was the budget of Athens: on the mines' revenue Themistocles built the fleet that won Salamis, and tens of thousands of slaves worked around the shafts. The mine wells, galleries and washing floors survive in the hills of Lavreotiki, and this is the rare case where antiquity appears not as a temple but as a factory.

The Milos part is a day on the island with a local escort. Plaka, the capital on its hill, is built to Cycladic logic: a maze against pirates, a Venetian kastro at the summit, churches with blue domes. Below lie the catacombs — among the largest early Christian ones in the Mediterranean, a kilometre of galleries cut into tuff where burials began in the first century. Nearby are the ancient theatre and a plaque at the spot where in 1820 a farmer dug up the Venus de Milo, which has since moved to the Louvre.

The third layer is alive: fishing hamlets like Klima, where the ground floors of the houses are boat-garages, syrmata, each painted its owner's colour. It is architecture without architects, and it tells more about island life than museum cases do. The morning-ferry-to-evening-ferry format lets you gather all three layers in a single day without moving your luggage anywhere.