Evia Island

Stretching for some 180 kilometres along the western Aegean and narrowing in places to barely six, Evia — Euboea in its older spelling — is Greece's second-largest island after Crete and the sixth largest in the Mediterranean. It covers 3,684 square kilometres and had a population of 191,206 at the 2011 census. Its ancient name is usually translated as the land of well-fed oxen, a nod to the fertile plains that made the island worth fighting over. It lies so close to the mainland that just two bridges at Chalcis span the gap, and despite sitting barely an hour from Athens, Evia remains largely overlooked by international tourism, which keeps its beaches, thermal springs and hillside villages refreshingly uncrowded.

Chalcis, Eretria and a Long Line of Rulers

The island's early history is essentially the history of its two great cities, Chalcis and Eretria, both settled by Ionian Greeks from Attica and both named in Homer's Catalogue of Ships. Their quarrel over the fertile Lelantine Plain that lay between them produced the Lelantine War, counted among the earliest major military conflicts recorded in Greek history. In 506 BC Athens invaded Chalcis and planted four thousand Attic settlers on its land; in 490 BC the Persian admiral Datis sacked and burned Eretria and deported its people to Susiana, in what is now south-western Iran. Eretria was rebuilt, but the balance of power on the island never really returned.

What followed was a long succession of outside rulers: Macedonian control after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, Roman incorporation in the second century BC, Venetian sovereignty from 1390, and Ottoman conquest on 12 July 1470. Euboea joined the modern Greek state only in 1830. Every layer left something behind, from the Venetian towers of the south to the Ottoman Karababa Castle raised above Chalcis in 1684 to guard the crossing against Venetian attack.

Some of the island's odder historical threads are just as interesting. Albanian-speaking Arvanites began settling here from 1402, with around ten thousand arriving in 1425, and their dialect survived in the mountain villages for centuries. One of those villages, Antia on the slopes of Mount Ochi, produced Sfyria, a whistled form of Greek that carries across whole valleys and was first documented by researchers in 1982. Scholars including Barry Powell have argued that the Greek alphabet itself may have been devised on Euboea around 775 to 750 BC. And Aristotle, who had already written about the island's hot springs, died at Chalcis in 322 BC.

The Strait That Changes Direction

Evia is separated from Boeotia by the Euripus Strait, a mere 40 metres wide at its tightest point, where the tidal current reverses itself roughly four times a day and, around certain phases of the moon, falls into an irregular rhythm that has resisted explanation since antiquity. Skippers approaching Chalcis have to time their passage; locals simply call them the mad waters. Chalcis itself is the island's capital and largest town, with more than fifty thousand residents, a long café-lined waterfront, an archaeological museum holding finds from across Evia dating from the Neolithic to the Roman period, and a sliding bridge that still halts road traffic every time it opens.

A short way down the coast, ancient Eretria is the richest archaeological site on the island. Its theatre was built in the fifth century BC and seated around 6,300 spectators, the Temple of Apollo Daphnephoros went up between 520 and 490 BC, and the House with Mosaics, laid out around 370 BC, still preserves pebble mosaics of mythological scenes. The Swiss School of Archaeology has been digging here since 1964. The modern town sitting alongside the ruins is far younger than the name suggests: it was founded in 1824 by refugees from the island of Psara.

Mountains, Gorges and the Springs of Aidipsos

The interior is more rugged than most visitors expect. Mount Dirfi is the island's high point at 1,743 metres, rising over central Evia, while Mount Ochi reaches 1,394 metres in the south. Below Ochi runs the Dimosari Gorge, a Natura 2000 protected route of roughly ten kilometres where a cobbled path drops from the Petrokannalo col at 954 metres to the beach at Kallianos in four to five hours of walking. Scattered around the same mountain and near Styra stand the Drakospita, the so-called dragon houses: megalithic slab-roofed buildings whose builders, date and purpose are still argued over, with finds recovered inside them spanning the sixth to the first century BC.

The far north-west is spa country. Aidipsos, about 110 kilometres from Chalcis, counts more than 80 thermal springs emerging at temperatures between 28°C and 86°C, fed by water rising from roughly three kilometres underground. Aristotle, Strabo and Plutarch all mention them, and the Roman general Sulla came here in the 80s BC to treat a chronic skin complaint. Inland at Prokopi, the shrine of Saint John the Russian still draws pilgrims who walk to it on foot each spring. Much of northern Evia's pine forest was devastated by the wildfires that began on 4 August 2021 and destroyed some 50,910 hectares of vegetation according to the Copernicus emergency service; that landscape is still recovering.

Anchorages Along a Very Long Coast

For anyone island-hopping the region by sea, Evia is a classic stop on a Greece blue cruise itinerary, with sheltered anchorages at Aidipsos, Limni and Karystos offering a mix of thermal springs, harbour towns and quiet coves. Limni on the north-western shore is the prettiest of the small ports, while Karystos in the far south is a planned nineteenth-century town backed by two fortifications: the Bourtzi, a hexagonal tower built on the waterfront by the Venetians in 1350 out of limestone and marble taken from a nearby Roman mausoleum, and the hilltop Castello Rosso, raised on Byzantine foundations by the Lombard baron Ravano dalle Carceri between 1209 and 1216 and bought by Venice in 1359 for six thousand ducats.

Because the island shelters a long channel between itself and the mainland, crews get a genuine choice of conditions: the protected inner waters of the North and South Euboean Gulfs when the Meltemi is blowing hard down the Aegean, and the more exposed eastern shore when it is not. Kymi, on that eastern side, is built amphitheatrically above the sea in stone and cobbled lanes and is the ferry link to Skyros. Provisioning is straightforward at Chalcis, Eretria and Karystos, and the tavernas here still trade on local produce rather than tourist menus, which is a large part of the reason to come.