The museum is housed in a building that is itself a relic of Naxos under foreign rule. Raised somewhere between 1600 and 1800 within the walls of the medieval Kastro, it served the Jesuit school founded here in 1700 - one of the institutions through which the Catholic Latin minority educated the island's children during the long Venetian and Ottoman centuries. Only in 1972 did it become the Archaeological Museum, and it has since been declared a historical monument in its own right. To reach the collections you climb the narrow lanes of the old castle town, so the setting prepares you: layers of Naxian history stacked one atop another, the building and its contents both speaking of the island's past.

The heart of the museum is its Early Cycladic collection, drawn from Naxos itself and from neighbouring islands like Keros and the Koufonisia. Here are the famous marble figurines, some dating between 3200 and 2300 BC - the violin-shaped early forms, the enthroned figures, the standing women with crossed arms. There are also stone vessels, the curious flat objects archaeologists call 'frying pans,' bronze tools, blades of volcanic obsidian, and jewellery worked four to five thousand years ago. We know little for certain about what these figures meant to the people who made them. Many were found in graves, laid with the dead. Stripped of their original colour and context, they survive as some of the earliest and most haunting sculpture in European art.

The collection does not stop at the Bronze Age. Late Mycenaean rooms hold stirrup jars and grave goods recovered from chamber tombs at Kamini and Aplomata, including jewellery from the grave of a child who died around the twelfth century BC and a painted hydria showing a fishing scene. Further on stand the geometric pottery of the eighth century BC and a room of kouroi, the standing marble youths Naxos became renowned for carving between 650 and 450 BC - kin to the giant still lying unfinished in the quarry at Apollonas. The journey runs all the way to a mosaic floor and delicate glassware from the Roman age. In a few rooms you walk the whole arc of Naxos, from its first sculptors to the empire that eventually absorbed it.

Practical details matter for a museum tucked inside a living medieval town. The Archaeological Museum of Naxos sits within the Kastro of Chora, the island's main town, reached on foot through the old streets where Venetian crests still mark the lintels of houses. Since January 2019 it has been open from 08:00 to 15:30 daily except Tuesdays. The morning hours are deliberate: come early, before the cruise-ferry crowds climb the hill and before the Aegean heat settles in. The reward is time alone with the figurines, those folded arms and blank serene faces that have outlasted everything around them and will outlast us too.