Escape to Astypalea

Isolated in the southern Aegean, about 350 kilometers from Athens, Astypalea has never been on the radar of the Satorini and Mykonos tourist crowds. It has the same raw materials: rocky mountains tumbling into a ludicrously blue sea, jumbles of boxy white Cycladic-style houses, and harbours lined with tabernas and small fishing boats. It even has a row of repurposed stone windmills near the center of its capital, just like Mykonos.

What Astypalea does not have is a scene. No international celebrities own homes in the hills – if they did, they’d be unable to keep it a secret. There are no Michelin-starred restaurants. Harry Potter and Game of Thrones did not film there. Astypalea’s tranquility is protected by just the right amount of isolation: from Athens, it takes 8 hours to reach by ferry, or about 45 minutes by air, if you can catch one of the small planes that cover the route a few times per week. When we landed, our plane was the only one on the tarmac at the tiny airport.

The island’s permanent population estimate of 1,300 feels generous because Astypalea empties out during the harsh, windy winters, and then fills up again each summer, when roughly 70,000 tourists pass through. If this sounds like a lot, consider that each year 750,000 visit Mykonos, and more than 2 million jostle for identical sunset photos on Santorini.

The Chora, or main town, is really not much more than a village. After a week of aimless wandering and eating in the maze of streets below the Venetian castle, my wife and I had tried almost all the restaurants, and returned to the best ones. We’d begun to recognize the local characters: the human ones, but also the innumerable cats, the dogs, and a few distinctive goats.

Astypalea is roughly midway on the ferry route between Naxos and Rhodes, and the schedules favour those larger islands. Unfortunately for tourists and local taxi drivers, this means the ferries arrive and depart in the very early morning darkness, and the boats don’t linger. But without this vital connection, the island would be uninhabitable in the modern sense. In addition to passengers, the ferries bring shipping containers: these are swarmed by delivery trucks as soon as they are dropped onto the pier. Bottled water, packaged food, clothing, furniture, electronics, and building supplies (including countless plastic buckets of whitewash) are plucked from the pile and distributed across the island via a network of roads so narrow the trucks need to fold their sideview mirrors flat.

What the island does produce for itself is a source of justified local pride. Honey, collected from the loudly buzzing hive boxes scattered around the island, is naturally flavoured by the wild thyme and grows everywhere. Soft Chlori cheese is made from the milk of the goats and sheep grazing in the hills, the deep notes of their bells audible for miles when the wind is right. Wild saffron is collected from these same mountains each fall. Just behind Livadi, a relaxed beach resort town, there is a green valley between otherwise brownish mountains. This where local produce is grown outside and inside greenhouses.

Throughout our spring visit, local businesses were earnestly preparing for the summer tourist season. Progress had been delayed by an unseasonably cool, rainy spring, and Saharan desert sand had blown across the Mediterranean for longer than normal, coating surfaces in a reddish dust. What could not be scrubbed was being whitewashed.

Meanwhile, bulldozers repaired washed-out mountain roads and smoothed Livadi beach, pushing aside the knots of dried seaweed we’d observed on our first day to create a uniform base for rows of beach chairs. By the end of our stay, in early June, many of these chairs were already filled with rapidly-reddening sunbathers, and the restaurants behind them were doing a swift business selling carafes of wine, Greek beers, and seafood pastas. We chose one place at random, on the first warm day. The friendly owner made us regulars, and we returned several times to warm welcomes and an agreement that yes, it was actually still too chilly to swim for longer than the quick dunks we’d braved. September, she told us, is ideal at Livadi: the sea is warm, and the crowds are more manageable than in July and August.

We were more than happy to eat, drink, and enjoy the views of the lapping waves with our feet just clear of the sand. The walk home from the beach was short, but steep – almost every road winds up or down a hill on Astypalea. Locals save their knees and zoom around on scooters, or in small cars, and sometimes offered us a lift as they passed us on a particularly vertical stretch of asphalt. But we were on vacation, and never in much of a hurry.

Astypalea doesn’t have any photogenically restored ancient Greek ruins, but its history is long. During ancient times, evidence shows the island may have been home to a shrine to Eileithyia, described in Homer’s Iliad as a goddess of childbirth. Archaeologists suspect that women from other islands traveled to Astypalaea to give birth. At Kalindra, just below the windmill square, ongoing excavations have revealed the remains of nearly 3,000 babies carefully buried inside clay amphorae over a span of nearly 1,000 years. The worship of Eileithyia was an acknowledgment of how dangerous childbirth could be in premodern times, and her protection sadly wasn’t always enough.

In later years, tiny Astypalea was passed between empires. The Romans administered the island under the name Stampalia and, according to Laurence Durrell, once anchored their military fleet in the main bay. The Venetians left behind the now-ruined castle that dominates the Chora. During 400 years of Ottoman rule the population was left undefended from raiding pirates. At Maltezana, today a picturesque beach resort town, Maltese pirates routinely terrorized the local population in the 18th century. On a stony bluff near Schinondas beach we found a monument to Hippolyte Bisson, a little-known French captain who sacrificed his own life in 1827 while blowing up a horde of pirates. Fresh flowers had been laid on the monument when we visited.

Italy took control of Astypalea in 1912 and stayed until World War II. Evidence of this period lingers in an abandoned military encampment on the eastern wing of the island. We paused there briefly in our rental car, surprising a few frolicking goats as we gingerly tramped through long weeds to peek into graffiti-covered concrete bunkers still furnished with rusty communications equipment and stenciled signage.

In 1947, after a brief period of postwar administration by the British, Astypalaea officially rejoined Greece. The island’s isolation, combined with a destructive earthquake in 1956, made life very difficult, and the population shrank. Only in the 1990s did modern infrastructure investments significantly improve conditions and begin to open the island to tourism.

But even as tourists discover it, Astypalea is still a place of tradition. Tiny churches still dot the island, mostly single rooms of whitewashed stone and concrete. One such church near our hotel, perched at the end of a rocky path behind a wire gate, seemed by day to be abandoned. But, each night as we walked back from dinner, we noticed a candle flickering in its tiny window. Orthodox churches were often constructed atop the locations of ancient pagan shrines, even if no evidence of the originals remain. Other churches, some centuries newer, were built along the coasts in an effort to provide convenient worship opportunities for fishermen heading out to sea on dangerous journeys.

At Konstantinos, after a cautious drive down a precarious dirt road west of Livadi, I clambered up a hill from the beach to investigate one of these churches more closely. My bare ankles were nipped by thorny plants and stingy insects, but I eventually reached the simple structure, freshly painted in bright white and Aegean blue. A greenish bronze bell hung from a concrete arch, and a rope dangled temptingly from its clapper. From the church hill I had unobstructed views of the rugged beach, the gleaming white Chora on the opposite shore, and the tiny uninhabited islands beyond the bay.

We left Astypalea reluctantly. The predawn sky was still black when our taxi quietly pulled up outside our door. The new modern ferry port was temporarily out of commission – the result of a vaguely described incident, perhaps a minor dock collision? – and so the Blue Star ferries were departing from the old port, Pera Gialos, below the Chora. We waited in the drizzly darkness for only a few minutes before a multi-story vessel loomed into the harbour, right on schedule. Moments later the rear gangplank lowered, spilling yellow light onto the concrete pier. We watched a small cluster of pedestrians and vehicles exit as we joined the line waiting to board, heading onwards to bigger and busier Naxos.

References

Astypalea.net. (n d.) The history of Astypalaia. https://astypalea.net/en/civilization/history

Durrell, L. (1978). The Greek Islands. Faber. p. 157.

Eliana Bakery. (n. d.) Authentic products from Astypalea. https://eliana-bakery.gr/en/

Got Away. (2023, May). Travel Blog: Astypalea. https://www.gotaway.ca/places/greece/astypalea/

Greeka. (n. d.). Santorini: General Information & Reviews. https://www.greeka.com/cyclades/santorini/about/

Greek Reporter. (2022, July 6). Why Many Churches were Built on Top of Ancient Greek Temples. https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/06/churches-christian-ancient-greek-temple/

Hellenic Republic Ministry of National Defense. (2022, January 28). Defence Minister Mr. Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos visits the frigate “PROVENCE” of the French Navy https://www.mod.mil.gr/en/defence-minister-mr-nikolaos-panagiotopoulos-visits-the-frigate-quot-provence/

Journey of Exploration. (2021, October 29). Astypalea Travel Guide. https://www.journeyofexploration.com/astypalea-island-guide-greece/

Kallichoron. (2019, March 9). The infant cemetery of Astypalea. https://www.kallichoron.gr/en/blog/item/331-the-infant-cemetery-of-astypalea

The Pappas Post. (2022, September 15). Mykonos Tourism Numbers Remain at Peak Levels Through September. https://pappaspost.com/mykonos-tourism-numbers-remain-at-peak-levels-through-september/