History of the Cyclades the 15th. In Mykonos a squad of 26 men attacked a munitions depot, killing six German soldiers and finally forcing the Germans to evacuate the island on 25 September 1944. Although nearly all of Greece was evacuated in September 1944, a few garrisons remained, such as that on Milos, which did not surrender to the island's sacred band until 7 May 1945. During the various dictatorships of the 20th century, the Cyclades, first Gyaros and later Amorgos and Anafi, regained their former role as places of exile. Starting in 1918, royalists were deported there in the context of the "Ethnikos
History of the Cyclades to the islanders how various governments thought of their island: as a deserted, inhospitable place where no one lived willingly. Some islanders joked that they could have whatever political opinions they wished, for the government had no other place to deport them. In 1968, 5,400 opponents of the junta were deported to Gyaros, facing Andros. The refusal of governments in the 1950s and ‘60s to improve port and road infrastructure on certain small islands of the Cyclades was interpreted by the inhabitants as a wish on the part of the state to preserve places of exile still sufficiently cut off