Aegina

Aegina is an island in the Saronic Gulf, about 27 kilometres from Athens, and one of the closest Greek islands to the capital. Its roughly triangular land mass of 87.4 square kilometres is built on an extinct volcano, with fertile plains in the north and west and rugged volcanic ground rising to Mount Oros, at 531 metres the island's highest point. The 2021 census counted 12,911 residents in the municipality, nearly 7,000 of them in Aegina Town, the island's neoclassical capital on the northwest coast.

A Sea Power That Minted Some of Europe's First Coins

In classical antiquity Aegina was a genuine maritime power, minting some of the earliest coinage in Europe around 700 BC. Ancient tradition credits Pheidon of Argos with founding the mint, and the island's silver staters, stamped with a sea turtle, circulated so widely that the Aeginetic weight standard of roughly 12.2 grams became a benchmark across the Greek world. That commercial reach put the island in direct competition with Athens. The two fought openly between 488 and 481 BC, and Aeginetan crews were judged to have won the prize of valour at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. Athens settled the rivalry by force: around 456 BC, during the First Peloponnesian War, Aegina was compelled to submit and to pay tribute fixed at thirty talents. Even the coinage changed, the sea turtle giving way to a land tortoise.

The Temple of Aphaia and the Ruins at Kolona

The island's best-known monument is the Temple of Aphaia, built around 500 BC on a pine-covered ridge some 160 metres above the sea, roughly 13 kilometres by road from the port. It is a Doric temple of the classic hexastyle plan, six columns by twelve, and it replaced an earlier sanctuary of around 570 BC that burned down late in the sixth century. Aphaia herself was worshipped nowhere else. The temple's pediment sculptures were removed in 1811 by Charles Robert Cockerell and Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, sold the following year to the future Ludwig I of Bavaria, and are still displayed in Munich's Glyptothek. A popular tradition draws a sacred triangle linking the temple with the Parthenon and the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion; the geometry is looser than the story suggests, but the sightlines are real.

Closer to town, the headland of Kolona preserves layers of settlement reaching back to the Early Bronze Age, including a fortified prehistoric town and a purple-dye workshop dated to the sixteenth century BC. The site takes its name from the single standing column of a late sixth-century BC Doric temple of Apollo, kolona being simply the Greek word for column. The richest single group of finds linked to the island, the Minoan-era gold jewellery known as the Aegina Treasure, has been in the British Museum since 1892.

Paliachora, Pirates and the First Capital of Modern Greece

When raiding made the coast unsafe, the islanders moved inland to Paliachora, a hillside town deliberately sited out of view from the sea. It served as Aegina's medieval capital under Byzantine and Venetian rule, and more than thirty-five of its churches and chapels still stand among the ruins. Its worst day came in 1537, when the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa stormed the town, had the adult male population killed and carried off some 6,000 women and children as slaves. It was abandoned in the 1820s, when the population moved back down to the harbour.

The island's most significant modern role came after the Greek War of Independence. Aegina was designated the seat of the provisional government in November 1826, and Ioannis Kapodistrias, the country's first head of state, was sworn in there in January 1828, making the island, for a short period, the first capital of the modern Greek state. The phoenix, the first coin struck by independent Greece, was minted on Aegina, and the archaeological museum Kapodistrias founded in 1828 was among the earliest in the country. The capital moved to Nafplio in 1829, but the neoclassical waterfront dates from those few years.

Pistachios, Pilgrims and the Modern Island

Aegina's economy today rests heavily on pistachio cultivation, introduced systematically by the physician Nikolaos Peroglou in 1896 and now yielding around 2,700 tonnes a year, alongside olive groves and citrus orchards. The Aegina pistachio has held protected designation of origin status since 1996, and the island celebrates the harvest each September at the Fistiki Fest, running since 2009. Pilgrims come for a different reason: the convent founded in 1904 that became home to Saint Nektarios, who settled on Aegina in 1908, is one of the most visited Orthodox sites in Greece. On the south coast, the fishing village of Perdika looks across to the uninhabited islet of Moni, ten minutes away by boat and inhabited only by peacocks, deer and wild goats.

Getting There and When to Go

Ferries run constantly from Piraeus, a hydrofoil covering the crossing in about 40 minutes and a conventional ferry in roughly an hour. The climate is hot and semi-arid, averaging close to 20°C with under 340 millimetres of rain a year, so May, June, September and October are the most comfortable months afloat. Its proximity to Athens, sheltered anchorages and easy sailing distance from the rest of the Saronic islands make it a natural call for anyone cruising the Gulf, and Aegina is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Greece looking to combine ancient history with an easy day's sail from the capital.