Spetses
Spetses is a two-hour Flying Dolphin from Piraeus, and the rhythm at the centre of town is set by horse-drawn carriages. Cars are banned within the village core, scooters and bicycles are everywhere on the perimeter road, and the carriages do real work taking guests and groceries to and from the hotels. They are not laid on for visitors. Knowing this is the difference between using the island and posing in it.
The heroine of Spetses is Laskarina Bouboulina, who in 1821 fitted out and commanded her own flotilla against the Ottoman fleet during the War of Independence. She bought a corvette of her own, the Agamemnon, and led the blockade of Nafplio. Her grey stone mansion two streets back from the harbour is kept as a museum by her descendants. Each year on 8 September, the Armata festival re-enacts the 1822 burning of an Ottoman flagship in the bay, with fireworks and a wooden ship set alight on the water.
The Poseidonion Grand Hotel on the waterfront, opened in 1914 by the Spetsiot benefactor Sotirios Anargyros, was modelled on the grand seaside hotels of the Riviera and has been carefully restored over the past two decades. It is the architectural anchor of the harbour and the obvious base for guests who want a sense of the older Athenian society register the island has cultivated. John Fowles taught at the Anargyreios School here in the early 1950s, used Spetses as the setting for The Magus, and renamed it Phraxos. The school is the imposing classical building above the harbour.
The interior is pine: a thick canopy of Aleppo pine, partly the result of Anargyros's reforestation programme a century ago, partly natural. Walking and cycling tracks run through it, and the southern coves are reached by water taxi or bicycle. Three nights, in late May, June, or September.
House Notes
Arrival
Helicopter from Athens to Spetses, around 35 minutes; Helistar and iFly Air Charters serve the route. Yacht arrivals berth at the Old Harbour around the headland, with the public traffic and the carriage rank holding the main port.
The address
Orloff Resort, near the Old Harbour, sits around a classical building that housed the island’s first port authority in 1802. The Orloff Restaurant has held the historic building since 1991. Whitewashed rooms cluster around a pool under olive trees.
The Spetses Museum
The Spetses Museum, in the mansion of Hatzigiannis Mexis — one of the first leaders of Spetses in 1821 — opened in 1938. The final room holds the Revolutionary flag, Laskarina Bouboulina’s ossuary, weapons, historical documents, and the portraits of the Spetsiot naval fighters. The ground floor keeps the Iria shipwreck finds, from around 1200 BC.
The Florentine ceiling
The Bouboulina Museum opened in 1991, founded by the heroine’s fourth-generation descendant Philip Demertzis-Bouboulis to save the 17th-century mansion behind the Dapia. The Florentine carved ceiling of the grand salon was the principal reason for the rescue; weapons, letters, and Byzantine icons fill the rooms.
The school
The Anargyrios & Korgialenios School Foundation keeps the campus open year-round. The classical building above the harbour holds the MAGUS Art Café — named for the John Fowles novel — a renovated library of around 5,000 volumes, conference rooms, and the school’s music academy.
The shipyards
Just before the Old Harbour, the karnagia — the traditional shipyards — still build and repair wooden caïques as they have since before the Revolution. The Spetsiot yards are unequalled in the Mediterranean for this; the craft passes from one generation to the next, and the same hands that turned out the island’s fighting brigs now lay down keels by eye. Walk the slipways at the water’s edge before the day’s heat.
The lighthouse
On the promontory that closes the east side of the Old Harbour stands the Spetses lighthouse, among the oldest in modern Greece — established in 1831, in the first years of the independent state, and automated in 1986. The conical masonry tower sits on a low hill above Baltiza; the walk out from the carriage rank at Dapia takes the southern shore the long way round, and the light marks the turn home.
Agia Paraskevi
Agia Paraskevi, on Spetses’s south coast, is reached by boat or by the daily bus from the town. Pine trees fall to the water; large pebbles below the picturesque chapel that gives the bay its name. The beach is organised — sunbeds, a beach bar — and the road traffic stops at the line of pines.
Zogeria
Zogeria, on the northern coast about half an hour from the port, is the alternative when the south is busy. A two-part cove of sand and fine pebbles, pine trees reaching the water, sunbeds, showers and a small tavern. Sea taxi from the harbour, or the dirt road around the headland.
The kitchen
Patralis, at Kounoupitsa, has been the island’s seafood address since 1935 — opened by Uncle Panos the fisherman, now run by his son Vasilis and his grandchildren Argyris and Nikos. Fish soup, astakomakaronada, shrimp saganaki with feta, crayfish, oven-baked lamb. Plain tables on the sea.