Most of the windmills went up in the 16th century, when Mykonos was under Venetian rule and Venice dominated the eastern Mediterranean. The location was no accident. Every mill is round, white, and crowned with a pointed roof of wood and straw, with windows kept small against the gales. Almost all of them face north, toward the source of the island's strongest winds across the largest part of the year. Construction continued in fits and starts into the early 20th century, but the design barely changed, because the wind never did. Sixteen survive today; seven of them stand together in a row on the landmark hill in Chora, the cluster most visitors picture when they think of Mykonos at all.

These were not decorations. They were industry. The mills ground wheat into flour, and for the better part of three centuries that flour fed the crews of ships threading through the Cyclades. Mykonos sat at a useful crossroads of Aegean sea routes, and a vessel could reprovision here before the long haul east or west. Grinding grain became one of the island's most important sources of income, a rare reliable trade for a place that ancient writers dismissed as poor and rocky. The wind that made farming hard made milling profitable. It was a neat, hard-won reversal of fortune, written into stone and straw on a windy hill.

Their decline was slow and then complete. As steam and electricity spread through the 19th and early 20th centuries, wind power became a quaint inefficiency, and one by one the great sails came down. By the middle of the 20th century the last mill had ceased production. What saved them was the very thing that had made them work: they were impossible to ignore. The towers stand on a hill where the whole village of Chora and a slice of the harbour spread out below, and they had become the island's signature long before anyone called it that. One mill now operates as a museum, and the rest endure, restored and white, doing the only job left to them, which is to be unforgettable.

There is a particular hour, just before sunset, when the light goes gold and the white plaster of the mills catches fire with it, and the crowd on the hill falls briefly quiet. Below, the rooftops of Chora tumble toward Little Venice, where balconies hang out over the water. The windmills are the first thing a boat sees coming into Alefkandra and the last thing the eye holds at dusk. They are found in some form on nearly every Cycladic island, but here, lined up against the open Aegean and the wind that built them, they have become the face the whole island wears.