Anafi Island

Anafi is a small island at the eastern edge of the Cyclades, just beyond Santorini, covering only 40.4 square kilometres and home to 293 people according to the 2021 census, one of the lowest population densities in the Aegean. Its name is said to come from the Greek for "he made appear," recalling the myth in which Apollo raised the island from the sea to shelter the storm-battered Argonauts.

Apollo Aigletes and a Temple Beneath a Monastery

The myth is stitched into the island's vocabulary. Apollo's epithet here was Aigletes, from the Greek aigle, the sudden burst of light said to have shown the Argonauts the way, while the island's own name derives from anaphainein, to bring to light. The Argonauts are supposed to have founded a sanctuary in gratitude, and a temple of Apollo Aigletes really did stand on the isthmus linking the Kalamos peninsula to the rest of the island. It is still there, in a form few visitors expect: the monastery of Zoodochos Pigi was built directly inside the ancient precinct and reused its blocks, so that dressed stones from the temple's courtyard and nave now stand in the monastery walls. It is a rare surviving case of a Christian pilgrimage site sitting literally on top of a pagan one, and the monastery's carved and painted wooden altarpiece, with icons largely attributed to Nikolaos Karavias, dates from the 19th century.

Climbing Mount Kalamos

The island's defining landmark is Mount Kalamos, a limestone monolith rising 420 metres on Anafi's eastern peninsula and ranked among the largest rock monoliths in the Mediterranean. A chapel dedicated to Panagia Kalamiotissa sits at its summit, built, according to local tradition, around an icon found floating on a reed and later moved into the ruins of an ancient temple to Apollo after a storm in 1887. The summit chapel was rebuilt after an earthquake in the 1950s, and the walk up from the Zoodochos Pigi monastery takes about an hour on a stepped path, ending on a ledge with the southern Aegean spread out below and Santorini on the western horizon in clear weather.

Exile, Empires and the Anafiots of Athens

Long before it became a stop on sailing itineraries, Anafi served as a place of exile, first under the Romans and again in the 20th century, when the Greek state sent political prisoners here. Between the two, the island passed through most of the powers that contested the Aegean. It was granted to the Venetian Leonardo Foscolo after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and appeared on charts as Namfio; it was recovered for Byzantium in the late 1270s by the admirals Licario and John de lo Cavo; it was raided by Hayreddin Barbarossa in 1537; and it later came under Ottoman rule, receiving a grant of local privileges in 1700. Russian forces used the Cyclades as a base during the war of 1770 to 1774.

The exile chapter proved the longest-lasting. From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, including the years of the Metaxas dictatorship, Anafi held some of Greece's internal exiles, chosen precisely because it was remote and thinly populated. A different kind of departure left an equally visible mark: from 1841, stonemasons from Anafi went to Athens to work on King Otto's building programme and put up their own houses on the north slope of the Acropolis, creating the Cycladic-looking quarter still called Anafiotika.

Kastelli, Chora and the Beaches

The ancient town of Anafi stood at Kastelli, on a naturally defended hill of 327 metres east of the modern village, and the sculptures, inscriptions and funerary reliefs recovered there, mostly Hellenistic and Roman, are kept in the island's archaeological collection. The modern Chora sits high above the port, a compact tangle of whitewashed houses and vaulted lanes reached by a switchback road up from the harbour, and the walk between the two is short enough to do in the cool of the evening.

The beaches are the other reason people come. Klisidi, closest to the port, is the busiest; Roukounas is the longest, a broad sweep of coarse sand backed by dunes and tamarisk trees that supply the only shade; and Katsouni, Monastiri and a string of smaller coves run along the southern shore towards Kalamos. Almost none of them have organised facilities, which for most visitors is precisely the point.

Getting There

Ferries dock at Agios Nikolaos, the small port below Chora, with connections to Piraeus, Santorini, Heraklion and Rhodes. The run from Piraeus takes between 10 and 12.5 hours depending on the route and the number of stops, which is a large part of why Anafi has stayed as quiet as it has. That isolation is now part of the appeal: with little large-scale development, Anafi remains a classic stop on a Greece blue cruise itinerary, prized for quiet anchorages beneath the Kalamos cliffs rather than nightlife or crowds.