Dia Island

Dia is a small, uninhabited island about 13 kilometres off the north coast of Crete, roughly opposite Heraklion, measuring around 5 kilometres long by 3 kilometres wide and covering just under 12 square kilometres of bare rock and low scrub. Known in antiquity as Standia, it served for centuries as the principal port serving Crete, and its sheltered southern coves have been used as anchorages since at least the Minoan period. Nobody lives there today and almost nothing has been built on it, which is precisely why it remains one of the more interesting places to drop anchor within sight of a major city.

A Lizard on the Horizon

Seen from the Heraklion waterfront, Dia has a long, low, ridged profile that Cretans have compared for generations to a giant lizard lying on the water. That resemblance feeds the island's best-known myth, in which Zeus turned a monster threatening Crete to stone and left the petrified creature offshore as Dia. The name reaches back further still: the Odyssey places the death of Ariadne, killed by Artemis on the testimony of Dionysus, on an island called Dia, although commentators have argued ever since over whether Homer meant this rock off Crete or the very different island of Naxos.

The island runs east to west and rises to 220 metres at the peak of Vardia, with cliffs falling as much as 60 metres to the sea along the exposed northern side. Everything useful is on the southern coast, which faces Crete. Four coves indent it - Agios Georgios, Kapari, Panagia and Agrielia - with a fifth, Aginara, around to the east, and the islets of Paximadi and Petalidi lying off either end of the island. Agios Georgios is the only place with anything resembling a landing, a chapel and a stone path running inland; the rest is trackless ground, thorny phrygana and stone, with none of the pine and cypress found on Crete itself.

The Harbour Beneath the Water

The reason Dia mattered is simple. It sits directly on the approach to Crete's north coast, and its southern bays offered shelter along a shoreline with very little of it. In 1976, the explorer Jacques Cousteau surveyed the water between Dia and Heraklion and identified lines of squared blocks on the seabed near Agios Georgios which he read as an artificial breakwater, the remains of an ancient harbour and, in his view, one of the most important ports on Crete. The same series of expeditions, carried out between 1974 and 1976, located seven ancient wrecks around the island.

Cousteau's reading was debated for decades, but systematic archaeology has since supported the broad picture. The University of Crete has run a survey of the island since 2010, directed by Katerina Kopaka, and it has recorded at least two large Minoan buildings together with a harbour installation at Agios Georgios bay. The same survey has mapped a much longer human story across the island: dry stone walls marking out old plots and dwellings, farmsteads, defensive works, two plastered cisterns, five lime kilns, a probable watchtower and a network of ancient paths. Finds run from the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age through Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman material, and include flint tools, obsidian carried from the island of Melos, seventeenth-century coins and shrapnel from the Second World War. A basilica foundation lies beside the mid-twentieth-century chapel of the Ascension.

A Reserve, Not a Resort

Dia is protected within the Natura 2000 network and recognised as an internationally important bird area. Its cliffs hold roughly 300 to 380 breeding pairs of Eleonora's falcon, one of the larger colonies in Greece, a species that arrives late in the season and times its breeding to the autumn migration of small birds across the Aegean. The island also carries a population of the Cretan wild goat, the kri-kri, moved to offshore islets including Dia and Thodorou to shield the species from poaching, along with protected reptiles, a wild rabbit and endemic land snails found nowhere else.

Officially the island is uninhabited: the last census figure, in 2001, recorded two people. Visiting is strictly a daytime affair. Camping, overnight stays, fires, vehicles and the collection of plants are all prohibited under Greek and European law, and there is nothing on the island to buy, so whatever comes ashore has to leave again with you.

Anchoring Off Dia

For sailors the appeal is practical as well as historical. The southern bays turn their backs on the meltemi, the northerly wind that dominates Aegean summers, and give calm, clear water within an hour of a major port. Day boats run out from Heraklion, Gouves and Hersonissos through the season, but they concentrate on one or two coves, so moving a short distance along the coast is usually enough to have a bay to yourself. Agios Georgios remains the natural first choice, as it has been for four thousand years, and it is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Greece. Ashore the ground is sharp and stony rather than sandy, so footwear matters, and the marked path up from the bay is the easiest way to see the island's interior, its abandoned terraces and, with luck, its goats.