On the wind-whipped islands of Greece, villages are named for the gods. Heraion, on Samos, celebrates the queen of Olympus. Poseidonia, on Syros, honors the sea god. Apollonia and Artemonas, on Sifnos, remember Zeus’s twins, who championed music, poetry and the hunt.
The mystical makes sense on these islands. It’s in the maps, the land. The sweeping cliffs and shifting sea — navy, royal, crystalline — “make belief believable,” as Flannery O’Connor once wrote. And people have trekked to the tops of those cliffs for at least 4,000 years to honor gods, ancient and modern.
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