POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA
A tiny island full of eccentric charm, rich history and colorful houses - and still free of beach clubs - Kastellorizo quickly imprints itself upon Kate Lough. After a 22-hour journey from Athens, her days are filled with ebullient Greek hospitality and afternoon swims. Kate shares a postcard from the lesser-visited (but no less special) Aegean island.
BY KATE LOUGH | CABANA TRAVEL | 29 JANUARY 2024
Kastellorizo seen from the water © Kate Lough
I peel back the porthole curtain, to find dawn tap dancing over the bow of the boat. The Aegean stretching without limit. There are four more hours until we reach the island of Kastellorizo, and I feel neither here nor there. Later, as we nose into Kastellorizo’s harbour, everyone floods onto the deck. The Patmos Blue Star extends nearly across its entire width as ropes are thrown to shore.
I have travelled for more than 22 hours from Piraeus and I ponder how this can still be Greece. Turkey’s Kaş sits just across the water, and the island’s dolls' house mansions feel Italianate. Sugared in blues, greens, reds and yellows, they whisper to me of Ponza, Positano and Burano. It is beautiful but tiny, and I wonder how on earth I will spend five days here. How foolish I was.
Across the horseshoe harbour is The Scarlet House, one of a handful of traditional homes on Kastellorizo that are still intact, inside and out. Over the next blistering Autumn days, any preconceptions are gently prised from my hands, torn up and tossed into the water, which laps against stone a few yards away. With foundations dating back to 1820, it is like staying in a house museum or a ship. Like being folded into the lovingly dog-eared pages of a history tome, which begins a year before the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire.
After a matter of hours, I am on first name terms with half the harbourfront. Plans of solitude are abandoned and I become part of Kastellorizo’s cast of extrovert characters. Emotionally porous at the best of times, the island floors me. Tightly packed layers of energies, of those who have come and gone over the centuries, cause it to vibrate just beneath the surface. So that those with even half an ear out hear it keenly. The Scarlet House and its owner, Vassia, become sanctuary, mentor and inspiration, all at once. They help me understand that to feel Kastellorizo, is to feel its history.
Rich, complex and turbulent, it has known great wealth and great poverty, great opportunity and great calamity. In the space of mere decades, in the first half of the 20th century, it passed from Ottoman to French to Italian to British to Greek rule, while it was beset by bombing and earthquakes and looting. It is a place of ruins and shadows and ghosts, as well as of resilience, optimism and elegance. It has a nobility of spirit that enthrals me, and has enthralled many before me. Not least David Gilmour, whose Kastellorizon was inspired by a night spent here.
“I always say the island is like a big hug and the harbour is like an embrace,” Vassia tells me over our morning coffee. “But the island doesn’t like everyone, some it spits out.” And for everyone it is most certainly not. There are no beaches or beach clubs (thank god), and even fewer places to hide. I take to its idiosyncrasies instantly. A dive off the house before breakfast, where a detachable silver ladder transforms the harbour into a swimming pool. Leaving the doors flung open while we read in the courtyard, smiling as passers-by who, glimpsing black and white family photographs and maps, are encouraged over the threshold by Vassia. In the afternoons we stretch our legs.
A long swim from the nearby Megisti Hotel follows, peering through masks at the chippings of shipwrecked ceramics, hugging the coastline towards Plakes - a hot slab of ‘beach’ shaped from an old marble quarry, where you can find a little shade in the afternoon. On the way back, we tread water in front of a chapel-like old warehouse, just able to watch a sculptor at work inside.
It is the studio of Alekos Zigouris, a barefoot Greek artist who has been coming to Kastellorizo since the Seventies. We haul ourselves up the steps, wring out our swimsuits and Alekos — a friend of Vassia’s, of course — shows us around the vaulted space, given to him by the municipality. He has carved poems and creatures into its floors and walls, and displays his paintings for sale too. “Anyone can wander in,” Vassia assures me as we leave, “he loves it.” We hike up an old path above the harbour to Paliokastro — the ancient acropolis — passing goats “self-marinating” in rosemary and thyme on the mountainside. We're in time to watch the sunset over the neighbouring islet of Ro. In the evenings, we do as Kastellorizans do, and give our patronage to the different tavernas around town in turn. Invariably, the owners — more old friends of Vassia’s — join us at our table for wine or tsipouro as service winds down.
At Alexandra’s, which comes to be a favourite, we bump into Nikos Bogiatzis, island historian and one of the many Kazzies — Kastellorizans whose families emigrated to Australia. The next day, he invites me to his beautiful house on the other side of the harbour, a traditional treasure trove of Kastellorizan jewellery and traditional dress — bouklas and gold silk brocades — that will otherwise soon be forgotten. He shares family photographs and stories, and we part with a hug that chaperones a tear to my eye. Such is the potency of the Kazzy spirit.
Alekos Zigouris's studio seen from the water © Kate Lough
Just above Nikos’ house is another scarlet beauty, Casa Mediterraneo. I spend my final nights here, gaining a new literal and metaphorical perspective on the island. The hotel, which opened in 2022 is a collaboration between Marie Rivalant, a French architect who has been coming to Kastellorizo for more than 40 years, and Luc Lejeune, an Athens-based interior designer.
As a multi-colored stained glass window projects a rainbow of late afternoon sunlight across my bed, I look across the harbour to the Scarlet House, feeling as though I have neatly shuttled to the island’s more recent history. To a microcosm of its new-wave cosmopolitan scene. I imagine cocktail parties on the terrace, and beautiful young Athenians lazing on the loungers below.
I make a mental note to come back to the island next year. But when I return to Athens, it is not the tavernas, the hikes, the swims or the hotels I try to describe to friends. It is the emotional imprint of this eccentric little island. Which has marked me like an invisible tattoo, whether I like it or not.
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