In the early nineteenth century, the ground where the square now stands was a sandy lot with a single notable feature: the orchard of the Salaha family, which held two wells from which settlers bought water. The Municipality of Ermoupolis purchased the orchard in 1847 and commissioned the Bavarian architect Wilhelm von Weiler to design a proper square. In the years before and after von Weiler's work, the space hosted improvised entertainments — an Italian amateur troupe in 1845, a wooden amphitheater erected by a German impresario named Lamberger in 1853. By 1855 a permanent market building had gone up. By 1860 the soil had been leveled. By 1868 the centre was paved in marble, with the remaining sections completed in 1870. It was a methodical accumulation of civic dignity, layer by layer, until something unmistakably urban had emerged from the sand.

The square was first named Othon Square, in honor of Otto of Greece, the Bavarian prince who became the first king of the modern Greek state. Then came the events of 1862. In October of that year, residents gathered in the square to hear the news of Otto's expulsion from Greece. A few days later, on 15 October, it was renamed Leotsakos Square — honoring Nikolaos Leotsakos, who had led a military force from Syros earlier that year in a doomed attempt to free political prisoners held on the island of Kythnos. Leotsakos died in that failed campaign, along with an officer named Moraitin and a student named Skarvelis. Their sacrifice gave the square a new name, briefly. Then came Andreas Miaoulis. In 1889, a bronze statue of the admiral — hero of the Greek War of Independence, commander of the revolutionary fleet — was unveiled in the square, and the name changed again. It has not changed since.

The square's dominant building is the City Hall of Syros-Ermoupolis, designed by Ernst Ziller, with construction beginning in 1876 and completed in 1898. Ziller was Saxon-born, trained in Vienna, and had become the principal architect of the new Greek state — his fingerprints are on government buildings, theatres, and mansions across the country. The Ermoupolis town hall is one of his finest civic works: a neoclassical facade of columns and pilasters, pediment and symmetry, the full apparatus of nineteenth-century civic aspiration rendered in pale stone. Inside, the Historical Archive of Syros and the Municipal Library of Ermoupolis now share the building with the local government. The Apollo Theatre, a short distance away, was built by the Italian architect Pietro Sampo as a miniature version of La Scala in Milan. The square and its surroundings represent a concentrated argument, made in architecture, that Ermoupolis belonged to the European world.

Miaouli Square has functioned as Ermoupolis's stage for over a century of Greek political life. In 1912, a large crowd assembled here to welcome Eleftherios Venizelos, the liberal statesman who had just led Greece into the Balkan Wars. In 1917, the same square rang with denunciations of King Constantine I, whose neutrality policy had split the country. During World War II, Italian troops occupied Syros in May 1941, and the island endured years of famine and occupation. In September 1944, German forces bombed the eastern side of the square, causing serious damage. The armistice between Italy and the Allies was announced from a loudspeaker here — a moment of relief before the harder occupation that followed. The square absorbed all of it: the celebrations and the condemnations, the occupations and the liberations.

The marble is still white, the admiral still stands at his post, and the facades around the square — neoclassical in their bones, weathered by Aegean decades — have lost none of their self-possession. The City Hall, the library, and the historical archive occupy the same buildings. Parades and celebrations still use the square as their natural terminus. The port of Ermoupolis is a short walk to the south; the Church of Agios Nikolaos stands a little to the northeast. Walking the square on a summer evening, with the light going golden and the cafe tables spreading across the marble, it is easy to understand what the refugees who founded this city in the 1820s were reaching for. They wanted permanence. They built it here.