The city came first. Not a village: a proper ancient town spread across the slope above the entrance to the gulf, with two acropolises, walls, a probable agora, a theatre, a stadium, cemeteries outside the walls as law required, and its harbour where Klima is now. It was lived in for something like fourteen centuries, from the ninth or eighth century BCE into the sixth or seventh CE.
Then it stopped. And here is the part that is easy to get wrong: Klima did not inherit it. Kastro, Plaka and Trypiti all grew up outside the old walls, and the former town became something more useful than a ruin.
What a dead city is good for
Fields, mostly. The urban ground was farmed and grazed. Cut stone and marble walked off into later buildings, or into lime kilns to be burned into mortar — which is what happens to marble when nobody is watching it for you.
The tombs did better than the houses. Rock-cut chambers outside the walls, dry and cool and already dug, became stores and stables and cellars and cisterns. A burial chamber is an excellent cellar. Somebody worked that out and the knowledge stayed local for centuries.
Meanwhile the harbour itself was changing without anyone's permission — sedimentation and submergence altered the shoreline before the fishing settlement ever occupied it. The water moved, and the reason the place had been worth building on quietly rearranged itself.
The theatre has had more lives than you would guess
You can sit in it and look at the gulf, and that view is the most historically useful thing about the building — it is the line back to the harbour the city was built to work.
But the marble you are sitting on is a composite. Parts are ancient. Parts were excavated, stabilised and restored, with new completion pieces cut and installed between 2010 and 2015. And between the last performance and the first archaeologist, the structure was housing, and workshops, and a source of stone, and had graves and lime kilns in it.
The Catacombs below are a genuine extra-mural Christian cemetery cut into soft volcanic tuff, with inscriptions and commemoration. They are not — despite a story you will probably hear — a secret church where Christians hid from persecution. The archaeology does not support it. Even the "martyr's tomb" is careful institutional wording: the later altar use is probable, and nobody knows who was buried there. What you walk through is a conservation route, with modern connecting passages and closed galleries and reburied graves, rather than the complex as it was.
And the Venus is not the point
She was found somewhere in this zone in 1820, near what is thought to be the gymnasium — a broad association, not a known niche. The discovery predates the kind of excavation that would have recorded where she actually stood.
She is evidence that this was a city wealthy enough for high-quality sculpture in its public quarter. She is not the reason the landscape is interesting, and a second significant female statue turned up near the theatre in 1995 without anyone naming a museum wing after it.
The waterline, and one thing to remember there
The painted doors at Klima are syrmata: boat shelters at the waterline, often cut back into the tuff, with wide doors made that width because a boat had to go through them. The upper floors came later. What they are used for now varies house by house — working fishing space, family property, somebody's summer room, rented accommodation — and no source can tell you the proportions.
Which matters, because they are photogenic and they are somebody's front door. Being visible from the water does not make a threshold public.
Stand at the bottom and look back up. City, cemetery, farm, quarry, village, waterfront. Nothing here was preserved. It was used, and used, and used again — and the only thing that persisted through all of it is the shape of the hill.