From a distance, Syros is rocks and naked mountains. Come closer, a town studs two hills, with vast neoclassical villas overhanging the Aegean and a church blue as agapanthus, full of icons so heavy it’s as though the saints are staggering triumphantly through lava flows of molten Russian silver. Everywhere on this island’s 32 square miles exist remnants of a fervent history. Carved into its boulders are salutations made by ancient Greek sailors, thanking the gods for safe harbour. Legend has it, one chapel wedged into a cave was built by a fisherman saved by a giant octopus. Fragile lilies bloom through sand the colour of iron.
On 19th-century British Admiralty maps, the letters SYROS appear bigger than GREECE. Under French protection during the revolutionary war, Syros welcomed merchant refugees from other isles and prospered, building thousands of ships. Seminaries and schools. Printworks and theatres. Catholics worshipped up on the slopes, Greek Orthodox below. These days, with a bustling commercial shipyard and a population of 30,000, it is definitively a working island – independent, utterly vivid. But with relatively few visitors.
I ask Antonis, a local acquaintance, why. At a café on the corner of Miaouli square in the seaside capital of Ermoupoli, he dissolves a white lozenge of sugar into cardamom coffee. The 8am heat flickers brightly across his hands. Through a pecking crowd of sparrows, 85-year-old Father Alexandros, in black robes and kalimavkion hat, slowly swings a bag of breakfast cakes past immense palm trees towards storefronts piled with cherries and broom-cupboard-sized paper shops. White petals carpet the stones. Antonis reminds me that there are worse things than being a Greek island simply not like any other and wholly ignored by mass tourism. He tells me again his best story, of the time that Greta Garbo came to visit his family. He was nine. She was in her 60s, still luminous as a silkscreen. A scooter passes us, wobbling with boxes of apricots, and over its low glissando he remembers the way his well-to-do parents worried about what to say to the reclusive star. Precisely which glasses to use for the wine. Such stories are not rare on Syros. Queen Victoria loved the loukoumi from here – a Turkish delight perfected in the 1700s when Syros was under the patronage of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Every year, a batch flavoured lightly with rose would be dispatched to Buckingham Palace, wrapped in a moistening shroud of seaweed, like a gift from Ulysses.
I later head to the town port, where yachts nose a shore lined with immense 19th-century ruins of warehouses and granaries once full of flour and textiles when this was a centre of trade. Odessa, Trieste, Marseille, Liverpool, Syros. Store rooms long turned into unassuming restaurants heave with outside tables and the warm buzz of the wives and mothers and children of shipbuilders, waiting for their men to come off shift, every surface cluttered with plates of chips and spinach and lamb chops, waitresses hooting. I’ve heard people say it’s a shame the shipyard here is so unphotogenic, but they’re wrong. It’s the yard that makes the place so confident, gives it swagger. Syros doesn’t need visitors. Bikini-seething Mykonos, just over the water, is talked of with something approaching pity, as though it were some absurdly dolled-up relative.
Tides of teenage girls in biker boots, bare-legged in the salty dusk, lock arms and stomp up to the town hall, where their younger brothers loll on the huge marble steps playing Greek rap on their phones, laughter bouncing off flower-slung walls under the spreading yellow fuzz of streetlamps. Stunningly, the alley-ways towards the area of Vaporia look transported from Siena. Romantic, Renaissance and Pompeian eras combined in that Grand Tour style so adored by a seasick Byron, another lover of Syros. Vaporia – also known as Little Venice – is beautiful. But not in an oppressive way. You don’t fear you’ll break something. There’s immense grace and flourish in expensive details on the old merchant’s houses, some part-derelict, others minutely renovated. Lyres wrought in fine iron on balustrades, wooden shutters the exquisite colours of periwinkle and squeezed lime. Cornicing recalls a world of sophisticated comforts, where every evening meant a carriage ride to the Apollon Theatre on Vardaka Square to sit in a plump-velvet box beneath a ceiling painted with images of Dante. There are times – walking under a balcony shaped like a Botticelli sea-maiden, past crumbling salons lined with gilded mirrors mounted in the 1820s to catch lavish candle displays at a ball – that it’s easy to forget this is in fact a small Greek island.
On the map, no village on Syros is too far away. Its few miles are snug on the page – the island is shaped like the UK in miniature – but the roads here can be steep and sharp, clamouring with in-leaning grasses and purple flowers masking sheer drops, soft quiet light falling into gorges. I’ve never heard so many songbirds on the thermals. Strange and unlikely butterflies that look like crumpled wads of newsprint bash into the windscreen as my car fills with dandelion spores through the open windows. The crofted stone fields all around are in full beauty, butter-coloured flowers blurring in great pillowy masses and sparrow hawks circling fat grouse which have black, Zorro-like bands across their eyes and give an unusual call, like a rusted door creaking in a storm.
Seen from the sea, Syros can seem like a fortress. Savage jags of copper, spiked cliffs in ochre and beetle-blue basalt. Water a thousand shades of green. As I toil past after dawn one day on a little boat, beaches appear in a striking mercury shimmer – the sand is a metallic grey (although the cove at Agathopes is golden). Some are as small as a Hyde Park bandstand. Others, such as Delfini, are set with a thatched and ragged bar. Several can only be reached by boat or foot. On the shore I can see yawning children making dens in mounds of dried seaweed. Their families have been camping, forced out of tents early as the heat begins to descend, the morning already so pink-flamingo-flaring it’s like being woken with a shout. The fishing village of Kini is the prettiest, water clear to the depths, rocking with tens of little vessels dedicated to St George, the houses along the front strung with bikinis and beatniky signs for rooms to let. Restaurants such as Allou Yialou prepare lunches of fish roasted in rosemary that taste sap-green, almost like eucalyptus – an oily, drugging fragrance that seems to seep into the sunlight, the landscape, the broadening day, as men play board games and scooters whine down the pine-needle-carpeted sea road.
Dimitra Kolotoura, with her amber, almond-shaped eyes and fingers heavy with her grandmother’s onyx rings, has spent most of her life between Syros and Athens. Her fashion label Zeus & Dione uses silk embroidered on Crete and Argos, truly lustrous folkloric dresses constructed with the fine formality of Doric columns. When we meet one late afternoon for a drink in Ermoupoli, I tell her that I’m staying in a grand old merchant’s villa around the corner, Syros CMN, hovering right above the sea where the harbour sweeps towards the public lido, Asteria. She nods and laughs: ‘Oh, that’s the place where we had my daughter’s christening party. It was a lobster restaurant for a while. The floorboards, so cracked and old – you could see through them, down to the water.’ It’s a very common phrase here. Antonis is always saying it: ‘that’s the place that was built by my great-great-grandfather for his daughter’; ‘Oh, that’s the place that sold amaranth pie’. Everyone seems to have a connection to each building. Family stories about each dish, each street, each paint-peeled door with its knocker moulded into the shape of a refined lady’s wrist. On Dimitra’s wrist is a torque shaped like the Golden Fleece that Honor Blackman might have worn playing Hera, observing from Mount Olympus the deep foolishness of humans in Jason and the Argonauts.
A few doors down, Raphaelos, his shirt powdered with dust, shuts up his antiques shop, crammed with 78s of Donizetti and photographs of old dignitaries and legless dressing tables garlanded by tin flowers. Meanwhile, Androu street is coming to life, a gorgeous sweep set back from the port, its tables overhung with bougainvillaea that blazes so scarlet the whole scene looks like a coral reef. Thin cats nuzzle the cobbles. The restaurants along here are the best in town: Ousyra, where the handsome chef with grill marks along his brown arms listens to Portishead while staff reverently watch him plate up snow-white anchovies and salads of wild berries as though he were a heart surgeon. Kouzina – for island wine that tastes of chamomile and strawberry. Jar – cocktails created from ouzo and rose water. Django Gelato – where obsessive Konstantinos makes ice cream flavoured with star anise and hibiscus that sells out in 30 minutes flat, then sits outside all day, frowning over recipe books.
One Sunday a north-west wind gets up and all is very clear and blue. I drive to Ano Syros, the old Catholic capital, one of the isle’s most atmospheric places, where the islanders fled to escape Saracen pirates in 1208, building a fortified settlement on a conic hill with stones brought back from the fields. Coiling cobbled alleys and stairways twist and lead nowhere, seeing out the millennia buffeted by the mistral, with views down to the port. Mykonos is a thumb-smudge on the horizon. I enter the town on foot, slipping up the white slits of streets, and don’t pass a soul for ages, not a glint of movement, but keep thinking I can hear sandalled feet slapping just beyond – the church-like acoustics of the place make everything feel like a remembered dream. Pots of geranium and jasmine. Handmade chimneys. Sharp turn-offs. Dead ends. Halfway up, I catch something wonderful and pause to take it in. On the air, the distinct twang of a bouzouki so melodic it’s as if Angel Romero were playing flamenco. Sticking my head through the half-open shutter of a taverna I find a crowd eating stuffed vine leaves and shreds of crusty bread, toasting the day with ouzo. Old men with their fingers laced tap booted feet, smiling and showing the odd gold-capped tooth. Ravishing youngmen shake great heads of black curls and raise more glasses of ouzo and raki, their girlfriends rolling cigarettes and leaning woozily against their shoulders. The whole room smells of burnt sage, everybody swaying to a Twenties ballad that goes something like ‘I will come and wake you. Nobody else will see us. Come to your window, I beg you!’
It’s as if the room and town and island have been plucked out of the everyday temporal continuum and held for a while entirely in a photograph. I stand there in a stupid bliss of finding myself in precisely the right place at the right time as everyone sings with tightly closed eyes seemingly to someone beloved but long lost on a distant hill. It is the Greece of anybody’s dreams. More songs. Fresh rows of shot glasses are lined up. The barman counts out crumpled money. Much later, when I leave, the stone acres around are swooped over by skylarks, and in the field that falls sheer to a drop at the end of the road come little goats with clanking bells, jumping behind their shepherd from rock to rock, under a sunset as vivid as a fantasy of poppies.
Where to stay in Syros
SYROS CMN
A fully restored, art-crammed 19th-century merchant’s mansion sitting on its own promontory with a dock and a deck dramatically overhanging the water. Painted a fragile shade of oyster, the building blooms into a dreamlike yellow when illuminated in the evenings, making it visible from a distance if you’re walking the coastal road through Vaporia. Rooms brim with soft beds and the silver sea is just beyond the windows.
Price: From about £17,240 per week
Sleeps: 10
Telephone: +44 20 8422 4885
Website: fivestargreece.com
SYROS GK & SYROS IK
These two immaculately modernist sister properties are positioned like sentinels on a vertiginous cli above Finikas, where a bakery sells cakes dripping in honey. They were built by best-friend owners as a rapturous tribute to the ocean and distant islands. Smooth and perfect as a nut – from its wooden garden door to its open-air cinema – IK has a saltwater pool you can roll into directly from the bedrooms, a terrace slung with crocheted Tarzan ropes and the constant presence of perky birds bright as candied sweets.
Price: From about £7,920 per week each
Sleeps: GK sleeps 10; IK sleeps 8-12
Telephone: +44 20 8422 4885
Website: fivestargreece.com
SYROS AR
The owner of this immense, jasmine-spreading house talks about her father sitting in the gardens in his dotage ‘like a buddha, peeling figs’. Close to Kini, it has a seawater pool that stretches into the distance, two private beaches and 60 acres lined with oleander and cedar. There’s also a cli to observe the August meteor showers. But the real lure is what cook Tereza puts on guests’ plates: rustic stews of beans and lamb; inky purple olives; feta baked until it’s a winey, summery velvet, sweet as dates. The best food in the Cyclades might just be served on this blossom-filled terrace.
Price: From about £16,660 per week
Sleeps: 18
Telephone: +44 20 8422 4885
Website: fivestargreece.com
GETTING HERE
British Airways flies from Heathrow to Athens. ba.com There are domestic flights from there to Syros, as well as ferry services that take two to three hours. Alternatively, boats from Mykonos take 30–90 minutes.
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