Nidri

Nidri is the largest resort town on Lefkada's east coast, about 16 kilometres south of Lefkada Town, with 1,110 people in the village and 1,402 in the wider community at the 2021 census, up from under 700 in 1961, which is the shortest possible summary of what tourism did here. Its palm-lined waterfront promenade looks out over a scatter of small islets, and the two statues standing on it explain most of the town's history.

Dörpfeld and the Homeric Question

One of those statues is Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940), the German architect and archaeologist who worked alongside Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, ran the technical side of the excavations at Olympia, and pioneered the dating of sites by the strata in which finds were made. He came to Lefkada convinced that it, and not modern Ithaki, was Homer's Ithaca, and that Odysseus' palace lay near Nidri.

Between roughly 1901 and 1913 he located and excavated 33 prehistoric burial mounds at Steno, just outside the town, dated to the Early and Middle Bronze Age. He set out the full argument in Alt-Ithaka in 1927. The theory never won the field over, but Dörpfeld never left: he spent his last years at Nidri, died on the island in 1940, and is buried on the Vlicho peninsula above the small chapel of Agia Kyriaki.

Skorpios and the Onassis Era

The second statue is Aristotle Onassis, and the reason is visible from the quay. Skorpios, a private island of 83.2 hectares lying just offshore beyond Madouri, was bought by Onassis in 1963, and the parties he held there put Nidri into international newspapers for the first time. Onassis, his son Alexander and his daughter Christina are all buried on the island.

Ownership passed from Christina to her daughter Athina. In April 2013, Ekaterina Rybolovleva, daughter of the Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, acquired a group of companies from Athina Onassis' trust for $153 million, a deal that included a long-term lease on Skorpios and the neighbouring islet of Sparti. The island stays private, so boats look rather than land.

The Harbour and the Water

Nidri's harbour handles a working mix of fishing boats, private yachts and ferries out to Meganisi, Ithaca and Kefalonia, and the town sits on Greek National Road 42. Lefkada itself is unusual among Greek islands in that you can drive to it: a causeway and the 70-metre floating bridge at Agia Mavra, in service since 1986, cross the Lefkada Canal, and the bridge swings open on the hour to let boats through.

On the water, the sheltered ground off Nidri and the near-enclosed Vlicho Bay immediately to the south make this one of the standard overnight stops on an Ionian circuit, with the islets of Madouri, Sparti, Skorpidi and Skorpios filling the view east. Restaurants, cafes and tavernas line the front, and the main street stays busy right through July and August.

Inland: The Dimosari Gorge

The obvious escape from the seafront is the Dimosari gorge, about three kilometres inland behind the village of Rachi. A narrow road ends at a car park and a taverna, and from there a paved path with small wooden footbridges runs a few hundred metres up the ravine under plane trees to a fall of roughly 12 metres dropping into a natural pool that people swim in. On foot from the town centre the walk takes about an hour; from the car park, a quarter of that.

Between its ferry links, its sheltered anchorages and its view towards Skorpios, Nidri has become one of the fixed points on an Ionian itinerary, and many gulet cruises in Greece call in here.