Skyros Island

Skyros, the southernmost and largest of the Sporades islands, lies roughly three and a half hours by sea from Athens and covers about 209 square kilometres, or 223 counting the offshore islets that belong to the same municipality. The 2021 census recorded just over 3,000 residents, concentrated in the hillside capital, also called Skyros or Chora, and a scattering of small hamlets. Its relative remoteness has kept mass tourism at bay, leaving long stretches of empty coastline, pine-covered hills in the north, a bare mountainous south rising to Mount Kochylas at 792 metres, and a genuinely local pace of life even at the height of summer.

A Fortified Town from the Bronze Age

The oldest settlement identified on the island is Palamari, on the northeast coast, a fortified town occupied from roughly 2800 to 1700 BC and excavated since 1981 under the archaeologist Liana Parlama. What has emerged is not a village but something closer to a small city: a defensive wall reinforced with horseshoe-shaped bastions, multi-room houses arranged along streets, courtyards, cisterns, storerooms, workshops and an early drainage and water-supply system. The position made commercial sense, since Skyros sits on the sea route between the northern Aegean and Euboea, and the settlement stayed in continuous use for more than a thousand years.

Lycomedes, Achilles and a Long List of Rulers

The island's name is woven through Greek mythology: it was here that King Lycomedes is said to have thrown Theseus from a cliff, and where the young Achilles hid disguised among the king's daughters before Odysseus discovered him and persuaded him to sail for Troy. Achilles' son Neoptolemus was born on Skyros. The recorded history is almost as crowded. Around 475 BC the Athenian general Cimon defeated the Dolopians who then held the island and annexed it for Athens; the Macedonians took it in 340 BC, it was restored to Athens in 192 BC, and it passed through Roman and Byzantine hands before the Venetians held it from 1204 until the Byzantines recovered it in 1277. The Ottomans took over in 1538, and Skyros joined the new Greek state in 1830.

Traces of all of that are still legible in Chora. A Venetian-era kastro crowns the rock above the town, with the Byzantine Monastery of Saint George below it, and two small museums, the archaeological collection and the Faltaits Folklore Museum founded in 1964, hold the embroidery, carved furniture and ceramics for which the island is known. The most striking survival is not an object at all but the pre-Lenten carnival, in which men dress as the geros, hooded in black behind a goatskin mask and wearing a belt of bells that can weigh up to fifty kilos, and move through the streets in a roaring, clanging procession.

Rupert Brooke and the Grave at Tris Boukes

The English poet Rupert Brooke died aboard a French hospital ship moored off the island on 23 April 1915 and was buried in an olive grove above Tris Boukes bay at the southern tip of Skyros; his tomb carries the text of his sonnet "The Soldier". The grave is deliberately unglamorous and awkward to reach, and the bay below it is a working anchorage rather than a monument. Three years later the island suffered a far larger loss that almost nobody outside Greece remembers: the influenza pandemic reached Skyros on 27 October 1918 and killed roughly a thousand people, about a third of the population, in under a month.

Ponies, Falcons and Mount Kochylas

The bare southern half of the island, dominated by Mount Kochylas, is a protected Natura 2000 site and one of the more important pieces of habitat in the Aegean. It holds the world's largest breeding colony of Eleonora's falcon, with more than a thousand pairs; the birds arrive in late April, time their breeding to the autumn songbird migration, and leave in late October for Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean. The same hills are home to the semi-feral Skyrian pony, one of the smallest horse breeds in the world at roughly 92 to 115 centimetres at the withers. It was declared critically endangered in 1991, and a 2009 count found 220 in Greece, only 152 of them on Skyros itself; several breeding and conservation programmes now work to keep the line going.

Harbours, Beaches and Getting There

Linaria, on the west coast, is the island's port, with the shelter and services most visiting boats need; the daily ferry from Kymi on Euboea takes about an hour and three quarters, and there is a small airport at the northern tip. Anyone sailing here in summer should plan around the meltemi, the northerly wind that blows hard and consistently across this part of the Aegean, and pick anchorages accordingly. Atsitsa Bay on the northwest coast is the usual quieter alternative to Linaria, while Tris Boukes in the south and the water around the offshore islets of Sarakino, Skyropoula and Skantzoura offer more options in settled weather. Beaches are plentiful and rarely crowded, among them Molos and Magazia below Chora, Kalogria, Pefkos, Acherounes and Kalamitsa. With its many sheltered coves, Skyros is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Greece, giving guests a rare taste of an island still largely untouched by crowds.