A tiny island full of eccentric charm, rich history and colorful houses – and still free of beach clubs – Kastellorizo quickly imprints itself upon Kate Lough. After a 22-hour journey from Athens, her days are filled with ebullient Greek hospitality and afternoon swims. Kate shares a postcard from the lesser-visited (but nomer less special) Aegean island.
I peel back the porthole curtain, to find dawn tap dancing over the bow of the boat. The Aegean stretching without limit. There are four more hours until we reach the island of Kastellorizo, and I feel neither here nor there. Later, as we nose into Kastellorizo’s harbour, everyone floods onto the deck. The Patmos Blue Star extends nearly across its entire width as ropes are thrown to shore.
I have travelled for more than 22 hours from Piraeus and I ponder how this can still be Greece. Turkey’s Kaş sits just across the water, and the island’s dolls’ house mansions feel Italianate. Sugared in blues, greens, reds and yellows, they whisper to me of Ponza, Positano and Burano. It is beautiful but tiny, and I wonder how on earth I will spend five days here. How foolish I was.
Across the horseshoe harbour is The Scarlet House, one of a handful of traditional homes on Kastellorizo that are still intact, inside and out. Over the next blistering Autumn days, any preconceptions are gently prised from my hands, torn up and tossed into the water, which laps against stone a few yards away. With foundations dating back to 1820, it is like staying in a house museum or a ship. Like being folded into the lovingly dog-eared pages of a history tome, which begins a year before the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire.
After a matter of hours, I am on first name terms with half the harbourfront. Plans of solitude are abandoned and I become part of Kastellorizo’s cast of extrovert characters. Emotionally porous at the best of times, the island floors me. Tightly packed layers of energies, of those who have come and gone over the centuries, cause it to vibrate just beneath the surface. So that those with even half an ear out hear it keenly. The Scarlet House and its owner, Vassia, become sanctuary, mentor and inspiration, all at once. They help me understand that to feel Kastellorizo, is to feel its history.