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The Greek Islands That Are Still Quiet
Santorini and Mykonos have become brands as much as places. The Greek islands worth visiting in the current decade are the ones that have not yet become their own photographs.
There is a version of Greece that exists entirely on the internet: the whitewashed walls, the blue domes, the sunset over the caldera from a terrace that costs four hundred euros a night. This version is real. It is also, now, primarily a backdrop for the photographs of the people who paid four hundred euros a night to be there, and the experience of being in that backdrop while hundreds of other people are simultaneously photographing it is something that requires a specific appetite to enjoy.
The other Greece — the one that has always been there, that does not require advance booking six months out and does not charge thirty euros for a cocktail — is less famous and considerably more satisfying. It is accessible, it is less expensive, and it is available to anyone willing to take a ferry that most tourists do not bother with.
The Dodecanese beyond Rhodes
Rhodes is the most visited island in the Dodecanese and the logical entry point, since it has the most flights. But Rhodes as a destination has been reshaped by its visitor numbers into something that is simultaneously beautiful and exhausting. The old town — genuinely medieval, genuinely extraordinary — is navigable in the early morning and impossible by eleven. The beaches near the main resort areas are organised for volume rather than pleasure.
Halki, thirty kilometres from Rhodes by ferry, has 300 permanent residents and a harbour front of coloured neoclassical houses that looks like something from an earlier century because it largely is. The hotels here are small pensions in restored houses. The restaurants are family-run and serve whatever was caught that morning. The beach, a fifteen-minute walk from the harbour, is occupied by the kind of numbers that the rest of the Dodecanese abandoned forty years ago. There are no ATMs. Bring cash.
Tilos, further along the chain, is a green island in an archipelago that is mostly bare rock — a consequence of volcanic soil and a population small enough to have maintained traditional agriculture rather than converting to tourism monoculture. The hiking here is among the best in the Dodecanese: trails to Byzantine chapels, to a castle above the main village, to a cave that served as a Neolithic shelter and yielded elephant fossils found nowhere else in the Aegean. The accommodation is simple and the restaurants are excellent. The island has a quality of not trying to be anything other than itself that is the most valuable thing a place can offer.
The Ionian islands away from Corfu
Corfu is the most developed of the Ionian islands and the one with the most direct flights from Northern Europe. It is also, in its north and west, genuinely beautiful in ways that its reputation as a party destination obscures. But for the visitor who wants the Ionian quality — the greener, lusher, more Italian-influenced character that distinguishes this chain from the Aegean islands — without the infrastructure that Corfu's popularity has produced, the answer is the smaller islands: Paxos and Antipaxos, Lefkada, Ithaca.
Ithaca — Odysseus's island, in the mythology and in a genuine geographical sense — has perhaps 3,000 permanent residents and a tourism economy scaled to them rather than to the numbers that its fame might attract. The island is mountainous and the roads are narrow and the tavernas are small and the bays are accessible only by boat or by a walk that filters out the visitors who want their beauty easily accessed. This filtering is what produces the quality of experience that the more accessible islands cannot offer: the bay reached after a twenty-minute walk, occupied by four other people, clear water, a single boat anchored offshore, silence except for the cicadas.
When to go
May and September are the months that the quieter Greek islands reveal themselves most fully. The sea temperature in May — around 19 to 21 degrees — is swimmable for most visitors and the accommodation and restaurant availability is near-unlimited. The light in September, after the high summer, has a quality that is different from July: warmer, more golden, lower in the sky for longer, producing the photographs that summer light can't quite achieve.
July and August on the smaller islands are genuinely less crowded than on the famous ones, but they are no longer empty — the word has spread enough that even Halki has a waitlist for its best rooms in August. The advantage of May and September is not just fewer people. It is the island operating at its actual pace rather than its holiday pace — the hardware shop open, the school running, the kafeneion at the harbour occupied by the same men who sit there every morning of every year. Being a visitor in the context of a functioning community rather than a service economy organised around visitors is the experience that the quieter islands and the quieter months offer. It is the experience worth going for.
Travel light. The small-island ferry carries your bag up a gangplank that is not always horizontal. The hotel is often up stairs. The beach requires a downhill path that is, on return, uphill. The Greek islands reward physical ease and punish the overpacked suitcase in ways that no other destination makes quite so clearly felt.
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