A Kleftiko boat tour heads to Kleftiko, a coastal spot on the Greek island of Milos. This page reads the idea through geology, language and nature. It covers natural arches, sea stacks, the klephts, breccia and weathering, then four short answers. Other sea trips and day outings sit among the Greece tours on the home page.
What is a Kleftiko boat tour?
The Kleftiko boat tour is a boat outing to Kleftiko, a rocky coastal spot on Milos. Milos is one of the Cyclades, which form a Greek island group in the Aegean Sea. Coastal means that the spot lies next to the sea.
Milos is of volcanic origin, which means that volcanoes built its land and rock. To the south of Milos lies the Sea of Crete. The island behind the Kleftiko boat tour has an estimated area of 151 square kilometres. Estimated means the figure is a close guess. Area means the size of the land.
Rough hills cover the larger part of Milos. Larger part means the bigger share of the island. Rugged means that the ground is rough and uneven. Hilly means that the land is full of hills. The hills reach their highest point in the west, at Mount Profitis Elias. That mountain is 748 metres high.
In Milos, the hollow left by the main crater holds the natural harbour. A crater is a hollow in the ground made by a volcano. A natural harbour is a sheltered place for boats that nature formed. Adamantas is the harbour town of Milos, the island of the Kleftiko boat tour.
- Protection: Nearly the whole western region, where nobody lives, is a Natura 2000 site for nature protection.
- Climate: The climate is Mediterranean. Dry summers are warm to hot, and winters are rainy but mild.
- Position: Milos is the Cyclades island that lies farthest to the south-west.
The Cyclades lie southeast of the mainland, the part of Greece that is not an island. Readers choosing a Kleftiko boat tour can use these island facts. They help readers place Milos on a map of Greece.
What does a natural arch bring to a Kleftiko boat tour?
A Kleftiko boat tour is a sea trip, and arches are one way that rock wears away. A natural arch is an opening through a rock, cut by weather and moving water. The examples here come from around the world.
Before a Kleftiko boat tour, a reader can learn the plain words for rock openings. The Natural Arch and Bridge Society identifies a bridge as a subtype of arch. A subtype is a narrower kind, so a bridge is one special kind of arch. The society says water is the main force that forms a bridge.
A weather-eroded arch is one worn down by weather. It begins as a deep crack that cuts into a layer of sandstone. Sandstone is rock made of sand grains pressed together. Erosion, which slowly wears rock away, then widens the crack. It sets narrow sandstone walls apart, and these walls are called fins.
Arches shaped by weather eventually collapse. Only stone supports, called buttresses, are left, and these keep eroding over time. London Bridge, a coastal rock formation with two arches, lost one arch after storms increased erosion. Change is the rule for arches, a useful thought for a Kleftiko boat tour reader.
- Xianren Bridge: This natural arch in southern China is the largest on Earth by a significant margin.
- Natural bridge: Paired sinkholes, which are holes in the ground, can collapse and leave a stone ridge.
- God’s Bridge: A road in Ponoarele, Romania, passes over a stone arch that stands 22 meters high.
Durdle Door, near Lulworth Cove, is a good example of a coastal arch. It stands on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset. A coastal arch is simply an arch on the shore. Such examples are handy background for a Kleftiko boat tour.
What does a sea stack bring to a Kleftiko boat tour?
A Kleftiko boat tour brings a coastal lesson about sea stacks. A sea stack is a lone pillar of rock left when waves wear away a headland. A headland is a point of coast that juts out into the water.
If a cave wears completely through a headland, an arch forms, a bridge of rock. When the arch roof collapses, an upright rock pillar is left as a stack. Waves at sea level cut under a stack until it collapses, leaving a low rock stump. A Kleftiko boat tour takes place at sea, where waves shape rocks slowly.
Sedimentary rock is built from settled material, and volcanic rock comes from a volcano. Stacks form in flat layers of either rock, especially on limestone and chalk cliffs. A harder top layer acts as a protective cap, called a capstone. Weaker rock such as claystone, a rock of pressed clay, tends to wear away too fast for pillars.
Over the long spans of time that rocks need to change, a stack is temporary. It also records headland retreat, which means it marks how far the land has worn back. Anyone planning a Kleftiko boat tour can use these ideas to read the shape of a rocky coast.
- Ball’s Pyramid: In Australia, this is the tallest sea stack in the world at 562 metres.
- Old Man of Hoy: This Scottish stack, 137 metres tall, is famous in the history of climbing sea stacks.
- Kicker Rock: This rock in Ecuador is 148 metres tall and is the leftover part of a volcano’s cone.
Faraglioni is the Italian word for stacks found along Mediterranean coastlines, such as those off Capri. The word names the same landform as the English term sea stack. Readers who know both words can name rock pillars on any coast before a Kleftiko boat tour.
What does the klepht bring to a Kleftiko boat tour?
A Kleftiko boat tour is a trip, while the klephts were people of Greek history. They descended from Greeks who fled into the mountains in the 15th century to avoid Ottoman rule. Ottoman means belonging to the empire that then ruled the Greek lands.
Klephts were highwaymen, meaning robbers on the road, who turned self-appointed armatoloi. Armatoloi is a Greek word for armed fighters, and these men gave themselves that title. Klephts were also anti-Ottoman insurgents, meaning rebels against Ottoman rule. They were warlike mountain-folk too, meaning people of the mountains who were ready to fight.
Under Ottoman rule, klephts were men fleeing vendettas, taxes, debts and reprisals. A vendetta is a long feud between families. A reprisal is a punishment given back for an earlier act. People who plan a Kleftiko boat tour can read about these men before or after the trip.
Klephts carried on a continuous war against Ottoman rule. Continuous means the fighting did not stop. They stayed active as brigands until the 19th century. A brigand is a robber who lives outside the law. A reader curious about a Kleftiko boat tour can take this war as plain Greek history.
- War: Klephts and armatoloi formed the core of the Greek fighting forces in the War of Independence.
- Phrase: Yannis Makriyannis called the klephts and armatoloi the yeast of liberty, a phrase about freedom.
- Songs: Songs of the klephts enjoy special popularity in the Greek regions of Epirus and the Peloponnese.
A Kleftiko boat tour shares a word with a Greek dish. That dish is slow-cooked lamb or other meat. Kleftiko translates as in the style of the klephts. Klephts without flocks stole lambs or goats and cooked the meat in a sealed pit.
What does breccia bring to a Kleftiko boat tour?
A Kleftiko boat tour gains one useful rock word from the stone called breccia. The word comes from Italian, where it means rubble. The name fits a rock made of broken pieces of older stone, cemented together into one mass.
Gravel is a loose mix of small stones. To deposit means to leave in place. The sharp edges of breccia show the gravel was deposited very close to its source area. The source area is the place where the pieces broke off. That clue is handy background for any Kleftiko boat tour reader.
Thick stacks of sedimentary breccia tend to form next to fault scarps in grabens. Sedimentary means built from settled bits of older rock. A fault is a break in the rock layers of the earth’s crust. A fault scarp is the steep step one side leaves. A graben is a strip of land that drops between two faults.
Lava is hot, melted rock that flows out of a volcano. Rhyolite and dacite are two types of lava, and their flows tend to form breccia by autobrecciation. Autobrecciation happens when nearly solid lava breaks into blocks that the flow folds back into itself. That makes lava one more origin of breccia for a Kleftiko boat tour reader.
- Fault breccia: This type forms when two fault blocks grind as they slide past each other.
- Impact breccia: The Neugrund breccia formed in the Neugrund impact, a crash from space like an asteroid, a rocky lump.
- Ancient Crete: Builders used breccia for column bases in the palace of Knossos on Crete in about 1800 BC.
Romans regarded breccia as an especially precious stone. A statue of the goddess Tawaret in the British Museum is one of the best-known breccia examples. For a Kleftiko boat tour, the lasting gift of breccia is simply a word with a long story.
What does weathering bring to a Kleftiko boat tour?
A Kleftiko boat tour invites a simple question about how rock changes. Weathering is one answer, meaning the wearing down of rocks, soils and minerals. Contact with water, gases, sunlight and living things drives it. A mineral is a natural solid in rock.
Physical weathering breaks rocks into pieces without any chemical change. The rock stays the same material, only in smaller parts. Frost weathering ranks as the top form of physical weathering. Frost means water that has turned to ice. Anyone planning a Kleftiko boat tour can treat these two terms as plain vocabulary.
Chemical weathering happens when water, oxygen and carbon dioxide react with rock. Carbon dioxide is a gas found in air. Salt weathering occurs when saline solutions seep into rock cracks and evaporate. Saline means salty, and evaporate means dry out. Sodium and magnesium salts are the strongest drivers of salt weathering.
Plant roots pry rocks apart when they grow into cracks. Lichen is a small living crust that grows on rock. A New Jersey study found weathering rates 3 to 4 times higher under lichen than on bare rock. That result shows how living things speed up the breakdown of rock. It is background reading for a Kleftiko boat tour.
- Soil: Materials left after rock breaks down combine with material from living things to form soil.
- Minerals: Albite and muscovite weathered twice as fast in live soil as in soil without life.
- Gas: Plant roots can raise carbon dioxide to 30 percent of the gases in soil.
Weathering is a slow natural process that breaks rock into smaller pieces and finally into soil. Water, gases, sunlight and living things all take part in it. Knowing these terms makes any Kleftiko boat tour reading easier.
Which four questions matter on a Kleftiko boat tour, and what are the short answers?
A Kleftiko boat tour raises four questions. A caïque is a traditional wooden boat. Sea water looks blue because it takes in red light. The Milos viper is a venomous snake. The rock dove is the wild form of the pigeon.
For a Kleftiko boat tour, what is a caïque?
Traditionally, the caïque is a fishing boat whose home waters are the Ionian and Aegean seas. Builders make it as a small wooden trading boat, painted in bright colours and rigged for sail. Its hull has sawn ribs and a timber keel, the base beam. Carvel planking, boards laid edge to edge, covers those ribs.
Before a Kleftiko boat tour, why does sea water look blue?
Pure water has a slight blue color that deepens as a sample gets thicker. Water absorbs the red, orange and yellow wavelengths of light. Absorbs means takes in, and wavelengths are the colors that make up light. So green, cyan and blue remain. The surface also reflects the color of the sky.
Which snake lives on the island behind a Kleftiko boat tour?
Its bite injects venom, which makes the Milos viper a venomous snake. It is a subspecies, meaning a local type. It is endemic to the Cyclades, a Greek island group, so it lives nowhere else. It lives on Milos, Siphnos, Kimolos and Poliaigos. Milos vipers grow to an average length of 50 to 70 centimetres.
Before a Kleftiko boat tour, which bird is the wild rock dove?
The common pigeon has a wild form, and that form is the rock dove. Two black bars cross each wing of the pale grey wild rock dove. They use cliffs and rock ledges for roosting, or resting, and for breeding, or raising young. Ledges are narrow shelves on a rock face.