The quarries at Marathi, on the slopes of Mount Marpissa, produced the Parian marble that ancient craftsmen ranked above all rivals. Its particular character — the result of geological conditions unique to this part of the Cyclades — gave it a fine, even grain and that famed translucency. By the fifth century BC, Paros had become one of the wealthiest islands in the Aegean. Under the Delian League, the Athenian-dominated naval alliance, Paros paid the highest tribute of any island member: 30 talents annually as estimated in 429 BC. Sculptors born here, including Scopas and Agoracritus, went on to shape the art of the classical world. The lyric poet Archilochus, one of the earliest Greek poets whose work survives, was also a native Parian. The island exported both its stone and its talent across the ancient Mediterranean.

Paros never held a fixed political allegiance for long. In 490 BC, during the first Greco-Persian War, the island sided with Persia and sent a trireme to support the Persian forces at Marathon. The punishment came swiftly: an Athenian fleet under Miltiades besieged the capital and demanded a fine of 100 talents. Later, under Themistocles, another heavy penalty followed. The island alternated between Athenian confederacies, Ptolemaic control, Roman rule, and eventually Byzantine and Venetian overlordship. Under the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, Paros became part of the newly independent Kingdom of Greece — the first time Parians had been governed by fellow Greeks in over six centuries. One of the heroes of that independence struggle, Manto Mavrogenous (1796–1848), lived her final years on Paros. She had both financed and fought in the war of independence; her house near the Ekatontapiliani church is now a historical monument.

During World War II, the island's suffering was particular and human. Italian forces occupied Paros until 1943, when German forces took over and imposed brutal control. In 1944, the Germans forced over 400 Greek workers to build an airfield near the village of Marpissa. Among the partisans who organized resistance was Nikolas Stellas, a 23-year-old. Captured and interrogated, Stellas refused to give any names. The Germans hanged him publicly. In retaliation, 125 Parians were condemned to execution — a collective punishment that was only averted when Abbot Philotheos Zervakos persuaded the German commander, Major Georg Graf von Merenberg, to relent. Stellas had already spent his life. The abbot spent his words. The 125 people lived. British commandos later bombed the Marpissa airfield. No trace of it remains today.

Modern Paros presents itself most fully through its two main harbor towns. Parikia, the island's capital, clusters along the western coast around the ferry quay, its labyrinthine old town of Cycladic whitewash winding up from the waterfront to a Frankish castle built from ancient temple stones. The Panagia Ekatontapiliani church dominates its lower quarter — one of the oldest standing early-Christian churches in Greece, drawing pilgrims each August 15th for the Feast of the Assumption. On the northern coast, Naoussa occupies a deep natural harbor once used by the Russian Archipelago Squadron during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Today it is a fishing village grown into a destination of its own: narrow lanes, seafood tavernas, a half-submerged Venetian castle at the harbor mouth. Between them, the island's interior rises to the villages of Lefkes and Marpissa, quieter places where marble doorways and stone-paved alleys suggest the island that existed before the summer season arrived.

The marble quarries at Marathi never entirely closed. Small-scale extraction continues today, supplying artisans and sculptors who still seek out the material for its particular qualities. The island covers 165 square kilometers and hosts a constellation of smaller uninhabited islets — Gaidouronisi, Portes, Tigani, Drionisi — along its coastline. Saliagos, the tiny islet between Paros and Antiparos, holds the earliest known farming settlement in the Cyclades, dated to 5000–4500 BC; the people who lived there were fishing tuna in the Aegean when Paros was still a geological idea. The island's modern economy runs on summer tourism, but the identity of Paros is still shaped by that ancient stone — translucent, warm-toned, carved across millennia into forms that ended up in museums from Athens to Paris.