Vathi

Vathy, also written Vathi, is one of the two ferry villages of Meganisi, a small island in the Ionian Sea lying immediately east-southeast of Lefkada. It sits at the head of a long, narrow inlet on the island's northeastern side, and that inlet is the reason boats come here at all: it runs deep, it is enclosed on three sides, and it stays calm when the prevailing northwesterlies are blowing hard outside. The 2021 census counted 177 people living in the village itself, a figure that multiplies several times over between June and September.

A Small Island With Three Villages

Meganisi as a whole is modest. The municipality covers just over 22 square kilometres and rises to a high point of 309 metres, and its population has been contracting for decades: 1,246 residents in 1991, 1,092 in 2001, 1,041 in 2011 and 926 at the 2021 census. Three settlements share the island. Katomeri, the largest and the administrative seat, stands inland on a hillside roughly two kilometres from Vathy and holds most of the island's everyday services. Spartochori, perched above the water on the western side, is the second port, served by the landing at Spilia below it. A fourth harbour at Atheni Bay is used mainly by fishing boats. There is a school on the island, though continuing education means crossing to Nydri on Lefkada.

Meganisi's coastline is deeply indented, cut into narrow bays between pale limestone cliffs that catch the light from seaward. It is this shape, rather than any single beach or monument, that gives the island a reputation among sailors out of all proportion to its size.

The Harbour, the Ferries and the Windmills

Vathy is Meganisi's main port. Car ferries run from here across to Lefkada, roughly four to five sailings a day in summer dropping to two or three in winter, with the crossing to Nydri taking somewhere between twenty-five and forty minutes. A small modern marina in the outer harbour supplies water and electricity, while the inner quay is lined with fishing boats and with the cafés and tavernas that serve whatever has been landed that morning.

On the ridges above the village stand the stone stumps of old windmills. They ground the community's flour until the beginning of the Second World War and have stood derelict since. Beyond the waterfront there is not a great deal to Vathy itself, a bakery, a few small shops and a scattering of rooms to rent, because the island's administration and most of its commerce are concentrated up in Katomeri.

Homer, Onassis and the Papanikolis Cave

Meganisi has attracted more than its share of speculation about the Odyssey. The German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who spent years excavating on Lefkada in pursuit of the Homeric geography, argued that Meganisi was the island Homer calls Krocylea, one of the territories of Odysseus' kingdom. The identification has never been settled and remains disputed among scholars, but it is repeated often enough on the island to have become part of its story.

The municipality also takes in two islets with a very different history. Skorpios, a private island of about 83 hectares just off the coast, was bought by the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1963 and became one of the most photographed pieces of private property in Europe. In April 2013 it passed, together with the neighbouring islet of Sparti, to a trust of Ekaterina Rybolovleva in a transaction reported at 153 million dollars. The island's other landmark is entirely natural: the Papanikolis cave on the southwestern shore, a flooded karst cavern reachable only from the water, running roughly 120 metres deep behind an entrance some 60 metres across and 30 metres high. It takes its name from the Greek submarine Papanikolis, commissioned into the Hellenic Navy on 21 December 1927, which by long-standing local tradition sheltered inside during the Second World War.

Between the shelter of its bay and the quiet of its waterfront tavernas, Vathy is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Greece.