Kea

Kea — known to Greeks as Tzia — is the Cyclades island nearest to Athens, a short crossing from the Attic port of Lavrio, and for that reason it has stayed the Athenians' own: a weekend island of stone villages and oak-shaded valleys that the international circuit has never quite found.

The greenery is the first surprise. Where the rest of the Cyclades is wind-scoured rock, Kea carries groves of valonia oak across its interior, their acorns once exported for the tanning of leather, and the terraced hillsides are bound by drystone walls that have held their lines since antiquity. The island wears stone and tile where its neighbours wear whitewash.

Ioulida, the capital, sits inland and out of sight of the sea — a defensive habit kept from the Aegean's pirate centuries — its houses climbing an amphitheatre of lanes too narrow for any car. Above the village, cut from a single outcrop of grey rock, lies the Lion of Kea: an archaic stone lion, carved perhaps six centuries before Christ, smiling out over the valley with an expression no one has ever quite explained.

Kea held four city-states in antiquity, and the grandest of them, Karthaia, survives at the island's remote south-eastern tip — a temple of Athena and a small theatre above an empty bay, reachable only on foot or by boat. The walking is the island's quiet pride: a restored network of waymarked stone paths, the old kalderimia, linking the ancient sites, the monasteries, and the coast.

The harbours are modest. Korissia receives the ferry; Vourkari, around the bay, is the evening anchorage where the Athenian yachts tie up and the fish tavernas fill. There is no airport, and there is unlikely ever to be one — arrival is by ship from Lavrio, an hour from Athens by road and an hour again across the water. Three nights, with a hire car kept for the south.

House Notes

  1. The address

    One&Only Kéa Island is the island's one resort at scale — an all-villa retreat reached in 45 minutes from Athens by speedboat, now in its third season. Ask for a Grand Seafront Villa with its own pool; dinner is at Atria, the long afternoons at the Bond Beach Club, and the One&Only Spa runs across three levels above the sea.

  2. The Britannic

    The HMHS Britannic, the Titanic's sister ship lost to a mine in the Kea channel in 1916, lies at 120 metres off the island. Scubalife runs the descent as a hypoxic technical dive for the trained few, with the nearby liner SS Burdigala on the same expedition.

  3. Ayia Irini

    Ayia Irini was one of the Cyclades' great Bronze Age towns, excavated across the 1960s by the University of Cincinnati under John Caskey. The shrine its diggers called House A gave up more than 30 near-life-size female figures in flounced Minoan dress, the best of them close to a metre tall. The walls and lanes are open to walk.

  4. The figurines

    The Archaeological Museum of Kea, in Ioulida, is where the painted clay women of Ayia Irini are kept — Middle Cycladic figures in bell-shaped skirts, unlike anything else in the islands. The same rooms hold finds from Kefala, the island's Neolithic settlement. A small, serious collection worth an unhurried hour.

  5. Aristos

    Aristos sits on the quay at Vourkari, where the summer yachts tie up, and it is the table the island books first. The lobster spaghetti is the order, the fish soup close behind. Take a place at the water's edge and let the evening run long; the house will hold the reservation.

  6. Red Tractor Farm

    Red Tractor Farm, a short walk above Korissia, is where the island's oak acorns are turned into something to eat — acorn cookies and small-batch preserves, sold from the farm itself. Kea's thyme honey, thick and pale gold, can be had here too; the considered stop for what to carry home.

  7. Kea Artisanal

    Aglaia Kremezi, the food writer, keeps a home on Kea and runs Kea Artisanal from it — small cooking days in her own kitchen and garden, built around what the island grows and cures. For a guest who wants the food culture first-hand rather than across a table, this is the one to arrange.

  8. Otzias

    Otzias, around the sheltered northern bay, is the longest organised beach on the island — calm, shallow, tamarisk-shaded, the family choice when a meltemi roughens the open coast. Come early, take the shade at the far end, and stay past the worst of the heat.

  9. Kastriani

    The monastery of Panagia Kastriani stands on a bare rock above the north coast, 12 km from Ioulida, reached by a long stair to a blue-and-white church raised over a found icon. A two-storey range of cells keeps guest rooms and a refectory; a night here, high and silent above the sea, is its own kind of stay.

  10. Ton Kalofagadon

    In Ioulida's square, Ton Kalofagadon is where the island keeps its old meat cookery — paspalas above all, pork slow-cooked with tomato, egg, and cheese, a dish Kea makes and few others do. It is the counterweight to the seafront fish: come up the hill into the capital and eat what the shepherds ate.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Korissia

    Korissia — Livadi, to the islanders — is the island’s port, and the Municipal Port Fund of Syros keeps a facility here for private and professional yachts, small craft and traditional vessels, alongside the ferries that come in from Lavrio: sixteen miles off by the municipality’s reckoning, an hour on the water. Lighting, water and power reach the quay.

  2. Vourkari

    Vourkari lies round the head of the same bay, and it is the harbour the Port Fund designates for yachting — the one of Kea’s two facilities that is not given over to the ferry ramp. Lighting, water and power reach its quays. It is where a yacht lies when it has come for the island rather than for the crossing.

  3. The Port Fund

    The authority of record is not on Kea. Both harbours are administered from Ermoupoli, on Syros, by the Municipal Port Fund of Syros — a public-law body whose remit runs to Syros, Kea, Kythnos and Serifos together, and which names exactly two places for pleasure craft on the island. A berth at either is arranged with that office, which keeps morning and evening hours.

  4. Karthaia

    Karthaia, on the southeastern coast, is the landfall that has not changed. The ancient city can be reached by land only on foot, an hour or so along cobbled paths, or from the sea by small boat, without the aid of modern harbour facilities. Two beaches lie either side of its hill, and above them stand the temple of Pythian Apollo and a theatre of eight hundred and eighty seats.

  5. Ladou

    Ladou is the small isolated cove on the north side of Otzias, and the municipality allows it two ways in: a footpath, or a boat. The second is the honest one. Nothing is organised there and nothing is sold, which is the whole of its case on an island whose longest beach lies round the headland and fills by noon.