'In the Covid-free Greek islands I found uncrowded beaches, low prices – and freedom'
Look right when entering Katapolo Bay and you will see Erato, Zeus’s muse, lyre pressed against her chest, her marbled gaze, faraway. She may be reflecting upon the indignity of her fate. Her unloved statue was removed from Athens in 1937 and dispatched three decades later to Amorgos, the Cyclades’ easternmost island.
Or perhaps she is musing over why this summer’s ferries look so desperately empty?
She’s not to know, of course, that Greece has reduced ferry capacities as part of social distancing measures and international travellers are significantly down throughout the Cyclades. Neither too, anything about coronavirus. Because no cases have been recorded in the smaller Cyclades where I spent ten insouciant days island-hopping, finding uncrowded beaches, low prices, half-empty accommodation, and freedom, after such a torrid year.
The Blue Star ferry takes nine hours from Piraeus (the main port for Athens) to Amorgos. I scarcely recall a lovelier voyage, sucking up salty spray whisked by the intensifying meltemi wind in sea as royally-blue as Cycladic domed roofs.
Besides Erato, Kondylia awaits me at Katapolo to drive me to her family-run Aqua Petra Hotel. Amorgos currently has few visitors, she says. “It’s worse than the Greek financial crisis”.
Yet they’d experienced challenges before. On Amorgos’s mountainous spine, where parched slopes tumble into the Aegean like crumbling feta, is the Byzantine Agios Georgios Valsamitis Monastery, built over a oracle-like spring possessing predictive powers. “My father consulted the ‘talking water’ for advice on when to build our hotel,” says Kondylia. “He ignored the advice to delay its building but then his grandfather fell ill and he could not open. The waters never lie”.
Hydro-divination was banned in 1967. “But the locals still do it,” she whispers. I didn’t dare ask if anybody saw coronavirus coming.
But it’s not the best monastery Amorgos has to offer. Near Chora, the main town, a sidewinding goat track wends down the mountainside to the whitewashed 11th-century Hozoviotissa, suspended like a limpet on a sea-cliff, Amorgos’s answer to Meteora.
Two grey-bearded priests are unloading supplies brought by donkey. I’m welcomed into the interior labyrinth with a glass of homemade raki and watch the eldest priest’s hand kissed repeatedly by Greek visitors near a gilded iconostasis. Are they concerned about coronavirus?
“The Grace of Panagia protects us,” I’m told.
I can only imagine the pious priests’ opinion of Amorgos’s most iconic beach, further along the coast, a rocky inlet popular with French visitors paying homage to Luc Besson’s 1988 cult movie, Big Blue, that was partly shot here. I plan to swim but feel overdressed amid nudists redefining its blueness.
Instead I retreat to Chora, where the whitewashed cubism of Cycladic architecture weaves its magic among medievally mazy lanes, soft cooling walls stymying Dantean heat. I drink island herbal tea, verbena, mallow, and mint, and visit a museum of far-flung memories, featuring Alexandrian glass and a Dionysian head fashioned from Parian marble.
“We felt isolated here for three months during lockdown,” says the masked attendant, who performs deft sidesteps to avoid me. She relaxes when I mention my negative test performed upon arriving at Athens airport.
Diminutive Folegandros lies two hours away, via Santorini. In the confined space of the fast catamarans, every other seat is blocked off by tape.
“Greece had just 3,000 cases. We did well. How did Britain do,” asks the bullishly likeable Konstantinos Makkos, owner of Folegandros Apartments, 19 self-contained units arranged around a swimming pool? I think he knew the answer. “But good to have a Briton back, you’re my first this season”.
He estimates a 60 per cent downturn in summer business. “August is looking okay but nothing much in September. The weather’s good then, why aren’t your countrymen booking ahead?” This, I couldn’t answer.
Coronavirus may prove a historical hiccup for an island that saw Minoan, Venetian, and Ottoman conquests. The Minoans likely coined the name Folegandros, but I prefer a Phoenician derivation translating ‘rocky land’, exemplified by shattered hills, sometimes topped by out-of-the-way churches reached by zigzagging climbs with more hairpins than the road to Alpe d’Huez.
It makes for great hiking and I’m up with the roosters one morning, crossing a wonderous sweep of stone-walled terraces with the magnitude of verdant Philippine rice terraces – yet I kick dust across these burnished steps, abandoned bar olive and fig trees. The trail continues to Angali, where I swim and watch a holidaymaker take a beachside yoga class from a female instructor. He interrupts his downward dog to answer his phone. She looks miffed. I rebalance my own chakra at a beachside café with a Greek coffee, its grinds like tar.
If anything, Folegandros’s Chora is prettier than that of Amorgos. A little gentrified, yet the cool narrow lanes of its Kastro (castle) quarter feel lived in. The Kastro overlooks three adjacent squares of al-fresco restaurants and boutiques of clothing and jewellery, and little bars offering the dangerously moreish subterfuge of rakomelo, raki with honey.
It feels fairly busy, but the owner of Folegandros T-Shirts insists it isn’t. “You may never see Chora like this again in July. Usually there is no place to sit or walk.” Indeed, I find a table with ease at To Spitiko restaurant and devour ‘chickpeas-from-the-oven’, infused with laurel leaves. The owner concurs trade is 50-60 per cent down yet seems more vexed Easter’s three-day parade was cancelled. “Not even war stopped this procession,” says Asigritos.
And coronavirus certainly didn’t stop Lucy and David Pattison from High Wycombe, the first Britons I meet on my island-hopping adventure. “It’s so quiet this may be the best time in years to visit the Cyclades,” says university lecturer, Lucy. “We feel safer here than we do at home”.
They’d arrived from Milos, my next stop. An island smouldering like King Alfred’s cakes that should’ve been celebrating the 200th anniversary this summer of finding a certain statue of Aphrodite. You may have heard of her? The Venus de Milo.
“In normal times we get 120,000 visitors but maybe 35,000 this year,” estimates Leonidas Foteinos, a local travel agent, at my hotel near Adamantas port. He says the domestic Greek market is filling a vacuum left by international arrivals yet it’s an Eleusinian mystery to him why more foreigners aren’t arriving as Milos remains virus-free.
See Milos from the sea, suggests Leonidas: “If you swim at Kleftiko it will be the first swim of your life”. I board caique next morning traversing the southern coast; its capacity is reduced to 60 per cent while staff wear masks and gloves and continually disinfecting handrails.
And Leonidas is right. Despite a becalmed meltemi exposing the visceral gavel of 40C heat, I’m enthralled by layered deposits annotating how volcanic Milos rose from the sea three million years ago like an angry Poseidon (wasn’t he always?), cocoa-brown ash and canary-yellow streaked cliffs being whittled away by the Aegean into sea arches and stacks. They coalesce at Kleftiko’s geologic fantasyland where I swim in 25C water into caves beneath calamine-coloured arches.
Local guide, Marinos Poutnides, knows this coast well. His father was a coastguard in the 1970s and met Jacques Cousteau here during his fruitless search for the lost city of Atlantis.
Atlantis would’ve been the next great discovery for Milos after a farmer unearthed Venus back in 1820. She was fresh in my mind because a few weeks previously we’d shared precious minutes together, alone, in Paris’s reopened Louvre. I told Marinos this, but he wasn’t impressed. “You know why I don’t like our archaeological museum,” says Marinos, upon reaching Tripiti? “Because it’s missing our Venus.”
Her discovery in a field is marked by a plaque, some 250 metres away from a marble Roman amphitheatre. What did happen to her notorious missing arms? Marinos shrugs. “It’s said they were broken off in a fight between rival collectors from Turkey and France”.
From Milos’s heights, you can see Sifnos, where my island-hopping odyssey ends. It hadn’t been a tempestuous epic like Odysseus’ progress towards Ithaca but a serene passage through one of the most beautiful island chains on Earth.
An advantage of a family-run hotel, says Beppi Gova, owner of Hotel Delfini, is that she doesn’t have to lay-off staff in bad times. Her son, Theodore, meets me in Kamares, Sifnos’s little port town. The public beach bustles with horizontal Greek holidaymakers and is backed by a formidable fortress of mountains.
“My mother knows the doctor who sends coronavirus tests to Athens and all have been negative,” greets Theodore, offering, in these extraordinary times, a bigger endorsement to travel than the attractions on offer.
Yet the island’s 60 miles of hiking trails speak for themselves. I take the bus inland to Apollonia and Artemonas, both whitewashed beauties coiling around pedestal hills, and I hike along the coast to a medieval Kastro and visit pretty Chryssopigi monastery where a tired old labrador blocks the stone staircase.
But with the meltemi abated, Sifnos sizzles, so I’m content to return to my hotel veranda overlooking the inky-blue Aegean, roused on occasion by the horn blasts of ferries, that come and go. The possibilities to venture onwards without the Cyclades usual summer crowds felt endless and tempting.
Greece essentials
Sunvil is offering two-week island-hopping breaks featuring three nights on four islands during September from £1,600 per person based on two sharing. The price includes international flights, transfers, B&B accommodation, two nights in Athens, and ferry tickets.
Mark flew with Wizz Air, which operates from Luton to Athens daily (lowest fares one-way from £23.99).
In Athens, Hotel 77 Suites by Andronis is a new option in a refurbished neoclassical townhouse with views to the Acropolis.
Mark stayed at Hotel Aqua Petra in Amorgos, Folegandros Apartments, Hotel Adamas in Milos, and Hotel Delfini in Sifnos.
For more information see www.visitgreece.gr.
