One island, two worlds

John Zada

• Last Updated: October 30. 2008 9:30AM UAE / October 30. 2008 5:30AM GMT

With magnificent scenery and character all of their own, the smaller Dodecanse islands offer opportunities to get off the tourist trail and experience a completely different side of Greece. John Zada for The National

For the mind that revels in indecision, there is no exercise more satisfyingly brain-racking than that of seeking out a Greek island on which to spend one’s precious holiday time. Look at any detailed map of the Aegean and Ionian seas and you will see why. Peppering that small expanse of blue is a near-infinite miscellany of weather-beaten rocks existing in their own worlds. The possibilities seem endless.

This search for an island, ironically, becomes exponentially more daunting as one eliminates the places that magnetise the Greece-going herd: Santorini with its honeymoon sunsets, Mykonos with its prefabricated hedonism, and Rhodes with its package tourist compounds and poolside fitness instruction sessions.

What remains, after these and the other usual-suspect islands have been knocked out of the running, is a strange and unfamiliar constellation of rocks whose names evoke few or no associations.

To non-Greeks, only a few are known, if at all, by their oversimplified and sometimes inaccurate epithets. There is the tiny island, the uninteresting island, the sleepy island, the forgotten island, the treeless island, the unvisited island, the hard-to-get-to island, the unliveable island, the Greek-tourist island, and so on. Each island is obscure and is absolutely unique.

After endlessly weighing the pros and cons of each destination, one finally settles on an island. In my case, it was the island of Karpathos, the windy island.

An elongated island in the Dodecanese chain, set between the islands of Rhodes and Crete, Karpathos stood out from the others by offering a little bit of everything, and not too much of anything. The island seemed neither too large nor too small, remote but not impossible to reach. It had its share of visitors (mostly expatriate Greeks from the US) but was not a “tourist island” and was endowed with quiet, unspoilt beaches and craggy mist-covered mountains.

What made Karpathos particularly intriguing was that its northern half was said to contain a handful of ancient villages that had existed in relative isolation from the rest of the island. So much so that in the case of one village, called Olymbos, most of its inhabitants were said to speak a forgotten dialect of ancient Greek.

The southern side of the island, Karpathos’s more visited and more accessible half, houses the island’s tiny airport, built on a flat promontory of low-lying land overlooking a small windsurfing colony.

Descending onto the runway, the first impression of Karpathos is that it is not as beautiful and self-contained as its postcard-perfect Cycladic cousins. It is instead incongruous, spacious and wild. The island’s beauty is elemental, conveying at times a difficult-to-describe feeling of inhospitability. Rugged and chronically windswept, the island’s large pines are bent southward in the direction that the blustery “Meltemia” winds blow. The disarming scent of thyme and wild sage belies the island’s implicit harshness.

Then again, Karpathos has never been an easy place to live. As a natural bridge connecting Crete with Asia Minor, its history has been defined by war and conquest. Since antiquity the island has been constantly under invasion by successive waves of Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Genoans, Venetians, and Ottoman Turks. The Italians took over the island from the Turks just prior to First World War, calling it “Scarpanto”. In 1948, following a post-Second World War British mandate over the island, Karpathos joined with the rest of Greece.

But this change was to have little immediate impact. Poor administration and neglect by Athens ensured that Karpathos remained isolated, and not entirely able to fend for itself. The great infrastructure of Greek shipping lines had not yet come into being, and only private boats could ferry people to the distant mainland and back. As a result of this and the ever-worsening farming conditions, Karpathians started leaving the island in droves by the midcentury to start better lives in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Since then, the island has remained much the same.

“Karpathos is one of the few major Greek islands that hasn’t seen much change in the last 30 years,” says Mike Frangos, the owner and head chef at Glaros Studios in Arkasa. “The population remains small, tourism is small-scale, and there are no factories or industry. The island is still pristine.”

Today the island’s southern capital and port, Pigadia, once aptly described by British novelist and Hellenophile Lawrence Durrell as being “pleasant but not memorable”, offers the usual Greek island tourist fare by summer. More genuine and far truer to the island’s character are its village-square gatherings that go late into the night. Here local and expatriate Greeks eat and drink, leaving their hordes of children to run wild while eager twentysomethings flit in and out of tiny tavernas.

This is one version of today’s Karpathos. Venturing across the invisible line dividing the island, and into the north, into the other Karpathos, one enters a world existing largely unto itself. My first hint of this place came by way of a taxi driver who felt compelled to comment on my desire to travel to the north.

“Why you want go there for?” the driver asked brusquely, glancing at me in his rear-view mirror beneath an old Borsolino cap. I replied, asking whether it was too far to visit. “Far? Why don’t you go to Milan instead? You’d get there much faster.”

The north was indeed beyond practical reach for most southerners. More rugged, barren, and windswept, it has for centuries existed in a time warp. Pirate raids between the 7th and 10th centuries AD drove the north’s inhabitants high up into the mountains, where they found safety in new villages. The largest of these communities today, Olymbos, was built on the landward-facing side of the northern slope of Mount Profitis Ilias, protecting it from view from the sea below. Today the town spills over the ridge, giving it a commanding view of the island’s west coast. A no-frills and dangerously narrow dirt road, built over a decade ago and accessible only to 4x4s, connects both sides of the island. A daily ferry travelling between Pigadia and the north’s smaller port of Diaphani also links north and south.

Because of the north’s prolonged seclusion, few people in the south know any northerners personally, and speak of the area as though it were an island apart. And in some ways it is. The Olymbians, the southerners told me, are more rugged and darker in complexion than they are. And many of them speak a surviving dialect of the old Dorian Greek.

“I don’t understand anything they’re saying,” said a restaurant owner in the seaside village of Agios Nikolaos. This was the mantra so often used by southerners who I asked about the north.

My interest piqued, I rented a 4x4 and resolved to make the three-hour drive to Olymbos from my base in Arkasa in the south. The gateway to the north is the town of Spoa, located at the island’s midsection. Here the main road ends abruptly, giving way to an innocuous dirt path. The drive ahead is slow, arduous and painfully nerve-racking. Narrowing along mountainsides, sections of the road bring one within feet of plummeting to a panoramic, action-movie death. The winds here kick up unexpectedly and blow so fiercely that the vehicle literally shakes, giving the terrifying impression that you are about to be blown off the side of the cliff.

Because of this daredevilling, the moment of arrival in Olymbos took on a less climactic note. Coming into view after one rounds a mountainside, the town – an patchwork of white, beige, yellow, and blue homes all stacked upon each other – although picturesque, appeared less ancient or dramatically forlorn than others had depicted. Seeing it for the first time was no quantum leap into the past.

However, Olymbos does straddle two distant epochs simultaneously, giving it a strange hybrid nature seen in few other Greek islands. The town combines old with modern and touristy. There are shops in every alleyway selling traditional textiles, embroidery and tourist bric-a-brac. Keeping guard over these shops and stands are older women clad in the traditional garb of the town – embroidered jackets, scarves and pinafores, and long goatskin boots. These women, who incidentally do all the work in the town (the men are nowhere to be found), can be seen making bread using old-world techniques around communal ovens. This is done from a genuine desire to keep alive the flame of tradition as well as to impress the tourists.

Despite modernity’s unavoidable inroads (electricity first arrived in Olymbos in 1980), the town remains out of step with the rest of the island. The Olymbians themselves, as the southerners had rightly claimed, seem a different race of people – many of them being dark, stout and weathered in appearance. A cluster of obsolete medieval windmills, archaeological wonders in their own right, crown the heights of the town. And in the afternoons, after the day trippers from Pigadia have caught the afternoon boat back, the town sinks into a silent stillness that harks back to another time.

But what vestiges remain of the past will likely not endure. The treacherous dirt road connecting north and south is today being widened and paved. Slated for completion in 2009, it will connect Olymbos with the rest of Karpathos – unifying the long-divided island for the first time.

Sitting in an empty cafe in the late afternoon as the town dozed, I asked the proprietor, an introspective and stoic young woman, how she thought the new road to the south would affect Olymbos.

After much thought she replied, “More people will come and we will change. The same as when the world came with the pirate ships long ago and we were forced to change. It’s not so different now.”