No supermarkets, no sunbeds: Santorini’s wild neighbour

This story does not begin with a pretty picture. It starts with six giant cruise ships, two fast ferries, countless catamarans, two dozen coaches and hundreds of sweaty, bewildered tourists jammed on to the dock in Santorini. “That wasn’t bad,” the taxi driver tells me, as he deposits me into the fray. Apparently, it can take more than an hour to negotiate the 3km of hairpin bends down to the harbour. “Sometimes, people have to get out and run with their luggage, so they don’t miss their boat.” A swarm of hustlers await new arrivals with oversized signs that shout “Taxi fast!” and “Rent a sexy car!”.

Eventually, the ferries depart and the mayhem momentarily subsides. Only 16 passengers, including me, hop aboard the Maistros, a boat that seems barely big enough to cruise around Santorini’s famous caldera. But soon we’re past the volcanic cliffs and the black-sand beaches crammed with rows of sunbeds, and out in the open sea — on our way to Anafi. I scan the horizon in anticipation of the distinctive silhouette of Mount Kalamos, the hulking outcrop of rock attached to the island’s eastern tip, whose peaks resemble the twin humps of a camel.

With overtourism all that any Greek (including those in the business of tourism) can talk about this summer, a lot of people will probably hate me for drawing attention to Anafi, one of the most isolated islands in the Aegean. Although it’s only a 90-minute boat ride from Santorini, it feels like a different planet.

Anafi’s port of Agios Nikolaos has a handful of tumbledown houses, three sailboats moored in the marina, a dinky beach, one taverna and a basic café, Florans, that serves cold beer and custard pie and always opens an hour before the thrice-weekly overnight ferry from Athens arrives — even if it’s at 2am. There are one or two small ferries from Santorini most days of the week in summer (though often not on Sundays); once in a while, there’s a connection to Crete or a 13-hour ride to Rhodes. In winter, the routes are even less frequent, and when the wind gets up there is no way on or off the island at all.

“Even if it’s a matter of life and death, you can’t do anything about it,” says Nicoletta Barbata, an Italian friend who moved from Santorini to Anafi a couple of years ago. She is one of only four permanent foreign residents among the year-round population of about 150. “It’s amazing how many things you can learn to live without. Even a pharmacy,” Barbata tells me. “Almost every household here is self-sufficient, which you have to be if there is no supermarket. Most people make their own cheese and honey and have a vegetable plot. It’s very ‘zero kilometres’.”

Everything on the table at Anemos, the deliciously simple taverna in Chora — the island’s only village — where we are having dinner, proves her point: the owner, Kostas Sigalas, is a fisherman who caught the grilled scorpionfish that morning. His wife Katerina, the cook, foraged the caper leaves that garnish the tomato and cucumber salad, harvested from the couple’s kitchen garden. Their beautiful daughter Maria offers us home-made halva for dessert.

Most places on Anafi are family businesses. All the locals do two or three jobs: the policeman also runs a taverna, and the taxi driver owns the only petrol station, which off-season is only open for one hour, three times a week. In the summer, there is a bus connecting Chora to the port and the string of sandy beaches along the southern coastline, but you can walk everywhere, if you avoid the midday heat and have sturdy legs. Footpaths worn smooth by shepherds trace the contours of the landscape, and the sheer slopes are ribbed with dry stone terraces built for grapes, barley and wheat. It requires grit and guts to cultivate or inhabit this terrain, and yet, as you ramble deeper inland, you stumble on humble farmhouses, called katikiés, tucked into the pleats and folds of the hills.

“At first these farmhouses all look the same, because the landscapes look the same, so you lose all sense of orientation,” writes Mina Kourti in her book “The Katikiés of Anafi”. Up close, each katikia is a unique expression of the genius of architecture without architects. With their barrel-vaulted roofs, wells and cisterns, stone stables and huts for making cheese, overgrown threshing floors and miniature chapels where the bones of the original owners are still stored, these composite dwellings were mainly used during harvest. Though many are abandoned, they are all protected by a preservation order. Their most distinctive features are the bulbous outdoor ovens, traditionally fed with thyme bushes and vine twigs to make bread and paximadia, twice-baked barley rusks. On Anafi, these are sometimes flavoured with saffron, gathered from the wild crocuses that flower in the autumn.

While villas and resorts are appearing at an alarming rate all over the Cyclades, there are barely any hotels or houses on Anafi. There are hardly any roads or trees, either. “If one tried to sketch this landscape, one would say it is like the music of Bach or the drawings of Escher, using just a few elements in every possible variation,” Kourti notes. The wide-open horizon is everywhere. Paths of prickly thyme and musky sage peter out at naked beaches that are blissfully free of sunbeds and beach bars. While most beaches have signs forbidding nudism and camping, in practice both are often tolerated on an island where people come to commune with nature.

If you want a hot shower and a comfortable bed, there are simple rooms to let in Chora (I stayed at the lovely Pelagos, on the southern, sunset-watching, side of town) and at the farm-to-table restaurant Margarita, a local institution overlooking Klisidi bay. If you can’t live without air-conditioning, iced cappuccinos and room service, there’s Ypseli, a huddle of nine unpretentious suites in the middle of nowhere. It’s so serene there that everyone speaks in hushed tones. At night, there are boundless stars and by day all you can hear is the sea breeze and the bees doing the rounds of the beautifully landscaped grounds. Ypseli is the name of the clay beehives that were once slotted into Anafi’s hills; today’s beekeepers still produce aromatic honey but use wooden hives. (Kyria Irini sells jars of wild-flower honey to passing strangers from her blue-and-white farmhouse in the valley just below Ypseli.)

From Ypseli, you can wander downhill to the crescent bay of Katsouni (named after the chubby local cucumber) or clamber over the rocks to Flamourou, where (at least during my visit in June) the only footprints in the treacly sand dunes were made by seagulls. Overlooking the beach is the most beautiful house on Anafi — and surely one of the most beautiful houses anywhere in the Mediterranean. Known as “the doctor’s house”, it belongs to Alkis Michalis, a retired heart surgeon, and his wife Annita.

“Everyone thought we were crazy when we bought this land in 1988. If they’d even heard of Anafi, they knew it as a place of exile for criminals and communists,” Michalis chuckles, flinging open the heavy wooden doors of the boathouse at the bottom of their 33-acre estate. With a barrel-vaulted brick roof, a carved antique door for a dining table, painted wooden floorboards and a travertine terrace that seems to float on the sea, it’s a recluse’s paradise (and now available to rent).

A sprightly eightysomething, with a quick smile and a restless energy, Michalis first came here in 1984, after performing life-saving surgery in Athens on the child of a family from Anafi, who invited him to visit as a token of gratitude. There were no roads and not even a port then; passengers and cargo were carried ashore in wooden rowing boats. “If you bought a donkey, they’d just throw it overboard and it would swim ashore and run for the hills, terrified.” Michalis pauses for comic effect. “Eventually, the new owner would track the beast down . . . ” It took a team of 20 builders three years to complete the house. All the construction materials, and the antiques and artworks that fill it, were transported by fishing boat, then carried uphill by labourers with their bare hands.

In a pair of tiny canaves (cellars) on the estate, the doctor’s nephew, Stefanos Michalis, produces natural wines from rare indigenous grapes such as Gaidouria. Also a talented chef, he has just opened his first restaurant on Anafi, Bandieroli, where wines from the Greek islands are paired with local dishes. From Bandieroli’s covered balcony in Chora, it feels as though you’re flying above the Aegean.

Mooching around the sun-dazed village in June, with only a handful of Athenian and older European tourists, it’s hard to believe there are not enough rooms or restaurants to accommodate the August crowd. “You imagine it as a lost paradise, but for a few weeks a year Anafi is a party island,” says Barbata.

While July brings the culturati from London, Milan and Berlin, lured to the island by Phenomenon — a biennial contemporary art festival with installations, screenings and performances all over the island — August is when the wild things come. They pitch up from Athens with nothing but a couple of sarongs and a pair of Birkenstocks, and string hammocks under the trees at Roukounas beach. They eat stuffed tomatoes made by the priest’s wife at Papadia taverna, drink mojitos at The Mule & the Pig, a feelgood beach shack, and party until dawn at bars known collectively as “the three Ms” — Monolithos, Mylos and Madres (the latter on top of a hill above the harbour). If Santorini is all about the sunset, Anafi is where you stay up until sunrise. But you don’t have to be a raver: watching the sun come up from the summit of Mount Kalamos, a 90-minute hike up a rock face so steep even goats don’t go there, is an experience you won’t forget.

Like the island itself, the fact that it’s so difficult to reach the summit acts as a protective filter. “Anafi attracts a like-minded crowd who appreciate isolation, but also come to make genuine connections,” says Effie Kalogeropoulou, the work-hard, play-hard owner of Margarita’s restaurant and Madres bar. “Relationships here are very personal.”

Those devotees are understandably anxious about the prospect of change. Alarm about the tiny airport currently under construction is probably misplaced — the runway will only take the smallest planes — but there are rumours of a high-speed ferry connection to Koufonisi, another remote island that has gone from traditional time-warp to trendy tourist destination in just a few years. Anafi may go the same way, or the islanders might cling on for a little longer to a way of life that has all but disappeared in Greece.

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