Nafklirou

Nafklirou is a narrow, cobbled street in the old quarter of Kos Town, running along the edge of the ancient Agora on its way down toward the harbour. By day it is a shaded lane of low buildings, cafe tables and oleanders, giving little away about what happens after dark; once the sun goes down it and the neighbouring Diakonou street become the core of what everyone on the island simply calls Bar Street, a couple of hundred metres of bars and clubs that stay busy until the early hours. What makes it unusual is not the nightlife, which Greek islands have in abundance, but that it runs directly alongside one of the largest excavated marketplaces in Greece.

A Street Along the Ancient Agora

The Agora of Kos dates from the 4th century BC and lies noticeably below the modern street level, occupying the block bounded by Eleftherias Square, Nafklirou, Platia Platanou and Ippokratous Avenue. It is one of the biggest sites of its kind in the Aegean, and what has been uncovered amounts to far more than a market: foundations of sanctuaries to Aphrodite and Herakles, an early Christian basilica and long stretches of the ancient city wall. One of the site entrances opens straight onto Nafklirou, so it is entirely possible to step from a bar table onto Hellenistic paving in a matter of seconds.

Earthquakes and the Shape of the Old Town

The reason so much of the ancient city is visible at all is a disaster. A powerful earthquake in 1933 flattened around ninety per cent of the houses in the historic centre of Kos Town. The Dodecanese were under Italian administration at the time, Italy having held the islands since 1912 and kept them until 1943, with formal union with Greece following only in 1948, and the Italian Archaeological School used the cleared ground to excavate on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible, working the Agora between 1935 and 1942 while the town was rebuilt around it. The layered look of the quarter, ancient stone beside interwar reconstruction, dates from exactly that moment.

The ground has not settled since. On 21 July 2017 a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck with its epicentre a few kilometres south of Bodrum, killing two people in Kos Town and injuring around two hundred. The old town took the worst of it: the Ottoman-era mosque, the church of Agios Nikolaos and the harbour-side Neratzia Castle all suffered structural damage, and the castle's interior has been under restoration ever since, backed by roughly 2.5 million euros of funding.

What Is Around the Corner

Nafklirou is short, and almost everything worth seeing in Kos Town sits within a few minutes of it. Neratzia Castle stands on a promontory guarding the entrance to Mandraki harbour; the Knights of St John began building it in 1436 and work went on for more than a century, producing a double ring of walls stiffened late in the fifteenth century against gunpowder artillery. Beside the bridge to the castle is Platia Platanou, with the Gazi Hassan Pasha mosque of 1776 and the plane tree that tradition links to Hippocrates, who was born on Kos; the tree standing there today is reckoned to be about 500 years old, at best a descendant of anything the physician might have taught beneath.

The harbour itself is lined with palms and tour agencies and is the practical centre of the town, with the old quarter pedestrianised behind it. Because Nafklirou sits so close to the port, many gulet cruises from Kos call in here, leaving guests a short walk from the quay into the old town for the evening.