The austere, marble-paved central courtyard was silent and deserted.
Columned porticoes and loggias rim marble-paved Renaissance squares buffed to a sheen by centuries of foot traffic.
The island's capital, Ermoupolis, an affluent harbour of neo-classical buildings, mansions, marble-paved streets and white houses, is 4km away.
So far the land boom along the coast shows few signs of slowing down, but inland, where enormous retirement communities, parched golf courses, and marble-paved shopping malls have sprung up, there is the barren look of impending disaster.
"Each succeeding story was precisely like the one he had left; it was always the same long, marble-paved corridor, with every door and window exactly duplicated," Sutphen writes.
A compact historic port city, with the dramatic Palamidi fortress as a backdrop, it has pretty streets lined with elegant Venetian and Turkish buildings twisting away from central, marble-paved Syntagma Square.
At one end of the immense, marble-paved piazza, Constitution Square, is an arcaded brick building constructed by the Venetians in the 18th century (now the Archaeological Museum); at the other end is a converted Turkish mosque.
Why? It's a little walled town unspoiled by tourism, with marble-paved streets, beautiful churches, an incredible market and the most delicious cafes and stalls selling pizza and polenta.
In the core of the car-free historic centre, locals have adopted a peculiar waddle, achieved by short shuffling steps, in an attempt not to slip over on the compressed snow which covers the city's beautiful marble-paved squares and alleys.
