Kastro (Greek: Κάστρο) is a settlement in

Sifnos Sifnos () is an island municipality in the Cyclades island group in Greece. The main town, near the center, known as Apollonia (pop. 918 as of 2021), is home of the island's folklore museum and library. The town's name is thought to come from an ...

Cyclades The CYCLADES computer network () was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate i ...

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

. According to the

2021 Greek census The 2021 Population and Housing Census () is a census in Greece that was conducted by the Hellenic Statistical Authority as part of the wider 2021 European Union census. As with the 2011 census, it enumerates the number of people in the country ...

it had 124 inhabitants. Kastro is built on top of a steep hill near the eastern coast of the island, at an altitude of 80 meters. Below the hill there is a small bay, which was used as the port of the settlement.

History

Kastro was probably created in the 14th century, and may have been built by the House of Coruña, who captured the island from the Byzantines in 1307. In the ruins of Despotikos, which was the residence of the local lord, there is an inscription from 1365, with the name of Giannoulis da Coruña. The earliest known mention of Kastro is by

Cristoforo Buondelmonti Cristoforo Buondelmonti () was an Italian Franciscan priest, traveler, and was a pioneer in promoting first-hand knowledge of Greece and its antiquities throughout the Western world. Biography Cristoforo Buondelmonti was born around 1385 into an ...

in the ''Isolario'' of 1420. Kastro became the main village of the island with estimations of its population in the beginning of the 17th century being at 5000 residents. It remained the principal settlement of the island until 1836, when Apollonia was designated as the capital of the island.

Geography of the settlement

Kastro is built around a hill and the houses and streets form an oval shape following the surface of the hill. Buildings are relatively small, with most of them having an area of around 30 square meters and one or two floors (including ground floor).

Places of interest

The Archaeological Museum of Sifnos, that started operating in 1986, is situated in Kastro. It hosts collections with sculptures, pottery and coins of

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

and

Roman antiquity In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdo ...

. In the settlement of Kastro there are also ancient marbles, columns and

sarcophagi A sarcophagus (: sarcophagi or sarcophaguses) is a coffin, most commonly carved in stone, and usually displayed above ground, though it may also be buried. The word ''sarcophagus'' comes from the Greek σάρξ ' meaning "flesh", and φ� ...

References

{{Reflist Sifnos Populated places in Milos (regional unit)