Meis Island

Kastellorizo, officially known as Megisti and commonly called Meis, is the easternmost inhabited island of Greece, a speck of limestone in the Dodecanese chain that sits far closer to Asia Minor than to any Greek neighbour. For sailors it is one of the most rewarding landfalls in the eastern Mediterranean: a single deep harbour ringed by pastel houses, an almost empty interior of rock and scrub, and a sea cave that comfortably outsizes the far more famous grotto on Capri. Small as it is, the island carries an unusually dense historical record, running from a Dorian acropolis and a Lycian tomb to the scars left by two world wars.

An Island at the Edge of the Map

Kastellorizo lies roughly 2 kilometres off the southern coast of Turkey — the measured distance from Cape Agios Stefanos to the Turkish resort town of Kaş is about 2.25 kilometres — and some 125 kilometres east of Rhodes, the nearest sizeable Greek island. The main island covers just 9.2 square kilometres within a municipality of 11.98 square kilometres that also takes in the outlying islets of Ro, Strongyli, Agios Georgios, Psomi and Tragonera. Despite an official name that means “the greatest”, it is in fact the smallest of the inhabited Dodecanese; Megisti describes its size relative to the cluster of rocks immediately around it rather than to the archipelago as a whole.

The 2021 census recorded only 594 residents, nearly all of them living in the harbour town of Megisti. That figure is a shadow of the island's peak: around 9,000 people lived here in 1908, when Kastellorizo ran a merchant fleet and traded briskly with the Anatolian mainland opposite. The name in common use today is thought to derive from the Venetian Castello Rosso, or “red castle”, after the reddish tint the harbour rock takes on in certain light.

Dorian Walls, a Lycian Tomb and the Knights

The island's oldest visible monument is Palaiokastro, a fortified ancient acropolis on the summit of Vigla, west of the town. Built by Dorian Greeks, its masonry carries an inscription dated to the 4th or 3rd century BC that preserves the name Megisti, the earliest written confirmation of what the island called itself. Below the medieval castle, cut into the rock face near the water, is a Lycian rock-cut tomb of the 4th century BC with a Doric facade; it is the only tomb of this Anatolian type known in Greece, and nothing else on the island explains its in-between position quite so neatly.

The Knights Hospitaller took Kastellorizo in 1306 and raised a castle on the red rock above the harbour, reusing Byzantine and older Hellenistic foundations. Ottoman rule followed the fall of Rhodes in the sixteenth century and lasted, with interruptions, into the modern era. The town below still carries both empires and both faiths: the Cathedral of Saints Constantine and Helena dates from 1835, while a late eighteenth-century Ottoman mosque beside the quay now houses the island's ethnographic museum.

War, Exile and a Second Life on Screen

Italy assumed control of the island in 1921 and administered it until the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 assigned it to Greece; formal union with the Greek state followed on 7 March 1948. The intervening war years were brutal. British commandos briefly seized the island during Operation Abstention in February 1941 before Italian forces retook it, and after Italy's capitulation in September 1943 Allied troops held it for the remainder of the conflict. A fuel dump fire in July 1944 destroyed roughly half the houses in town, and the civilian population, already evacuated to the Middle East, largely never came back. Most settled instead in Australia, where the Kastellorizian communities of Perth and Sydney remain substantial and their members are still known as “Kazzies”.

The island's modern profile owes a great deal to a single film. Mediterraneo, shot largely on Kastellorizo and released in 1991, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and turned a half-empty harbour into a destination. Visitors arrive today for precisely the qualities the film captured: silence, scale, and the sense of a place that was left alone long enough to keep its character.

The Blue Grotto and the Waters Around Megisti

A short passage along the coast leads to the Blue Grotto, known locally as Parasta or Fokiali after the monk seals that once sheltered inside it. The chamber runs about 75 metres long, 40 metres wide and 35 metres high, making it larger than its celebrated namesake on Capri, and sunlight entering below the waterline turns the whole cavern an intense, saturated blue. Getting in is the catch: the entrance is barely a metre above sea level, so passengers must lie flat in a small boat as it slips under the rock, and the trip is only possible in settled conditions. Early morning, with the sun still low, produces the strongest colour.

Beyond the cave the water is exceptionally clear and the coastline almost entirely undeveloped. The uninhabited islets of Ro and Strongyli make straightforward day targets, and the shore is rocky or pebbly rather than sandy, so swimming shoes earn their place in the bag.

Arriving by Sea and Choosing a Season

For anyone arriving by water, the main harbour on the island's eastern side is broad and well sheltered, ringed by pastel houses that once belonged to fishing families and merchant captains. Depths in the middle of the basin run to roughly 10 to 15 metres over mud and sand with generally good holding, shoaling to 3 to 6 metres toward the waterfront, where quay berths with water and electricity are available for a fee. Kastellorizo is best reached during a gulet cruise along the Greece coast, since scheduled ferry service remains limited and the island has little infrastructure for independent yacht provisioning.

The alternatives exist but are thin. Ferries connect to Rhodes and Piraeus and, seasonally, across the channel to Kaş, while a small airport handles a handful of Olympic Air flights each week. The climate is hot-summer Mediterranean and among the warmest in Greece, with an annual average close to 21.9°C and roughly 158 tropical nights a year, so early June to early October is the practical cruising window and August the busiest and hottest stretch of it. Whatever month you choose, the tavernas sit directly on the water, and the climb to the castle for sunset over the Turkish mainland is the one fixed appointment worth keeping.