Symi

Most visitors to Symi are day-trippers who arrive on the morning hydrofoil from Rhodes and leave by 4pm. They get the famous arrival photograph and miss the best part. Once they go in the afternoon, the harbour falls quiet and the cafe terraces along Gialos open up. Stay at least one night, two if you can.

The harbour is the showpiece of Dodecanese architecture: neoclassical mansions rise in tiers of ochre, terracotta and faded blue around a single semicircular bay. In the nineteenth century, Symiot families made fortunes in shipbuilding and sponge-diving and spent them on these houses. The island’s yards built the fastest small boats in the eastern Aegean. The divers went deeper than was wise, in canvas suits and brass helmets, and examples can still be seen in the small Maritime Museum. The trade collapsed in the early twentieth century, the families left and the mansions remained.

The Kali Strata, a broad stone staircase of around 500 steps, climbs from Gialos to the upper village of Chorio. The walk down takes 10 minutes and the climb back 20. Do it once at sunset, when the light falls on the western façades and older residents sit out on their front steps. On 8 May 1945 the document of surrender that ended the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese was signed in a building on the Gialos waterfront. A small plaque, which most visitors miss, records the event.

Panormitis monastery, on a sheltered bay at the southern tip of the island, can be reached by road or by sea. Pilgrims come for the icon of the Archangel Michael, and sailors use the baroque bell tower above the bay as a landmark. Symi has only short pebble beaches, and most swimming spots are reached by water taxi from Gialos. Bring sandals.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Symi has no airport. The fast catamarans of Dodekanisos Seaways, the HSC Dodekanisos Pride and the F/B Panagia Skiadeni, cross from Rhodes in 45 to 80 minutes, with three sailings a day from May to October. Helistar runs helicopter transfers from Rhodes Diagoras (RHO), where Signature Aviation provides the FBO, the ground terminal for private jets.

  2. The address

    1900 Hotel, on the waterfront of Gialos, the main harbour, is the restored mansion of Captain Fotis Mastoridis, who in 1862 brought the first autonomous diving suit to Greece from the West Indies. Architect Dimitris Zografos and his partner Vicky led the restoration. There are only four suites, numbered 1901 to 1904, and the address is the building itself rather than a room within it.

  3. Agora

    The Old Markets, a listed national monument on the lower Kali Strata, opened the Agora restaurant on its roof in 2023. Chef Chris Sidiropoulos was Chef de Cuisine at Hytra in Athens, and before that cooked at Midsummer House in Cambridge under Daniel Clifford, and at Hide and The Ritz in London under John Williams. The hotel itself has ten rooms in two buildings, the Ancient Agora and the Captain’s Mansion, open from 1 May to 31 October.

  4. Mylopetra

    Mylopetra is a stone-arched dining room one street back from the Gialos quay. A tomb from around 50 BC shows through thick glass under the floor; the body was found seated, a posture taken on the island as a mark of high standing, and the finds are now in the Archaeological Museum at Rhodes. The Mediterranean kitchen is measured in its ambition, dinner moves to the courtyard from June, and the room is the quiet alternative to Agora when an 11-course evening is too much.

  5. The Symi shrimp

    Simiako garidaki is a tiny crimson shrimp, 4 to 5 centimetres long, found in the stony shallows around the island and fried whole in olive oil with sea salt and lemon, to be eaten shell and all. Tholos, family-run and on the harbour, sits at the far end of Harani, past the working shipyard and short of the town beach at Nos. Order the monk’s salad of lentils and bulgur on the side, and the octopus as a second plate.

  6. Roukouniotis

    Roukouniotis, 4 kilometres west of Chorio, is the oldest monastery on the island, raised by the Knights of Saint John in the 14th century over the ruins of a 5th-century foundation and dedicated to Michael Taxiarchis. Its katholikon, the main church, is two churches stacked: an 18th-century upper church above an older lower one whose walls hold late-Byzantine frescoes. A hundred-year-old cypress stands outside the wall, and the monastery is quieter than Panormitis on every day of the year.

  7. Dysalonas

    Agios Georgios at Dysalonas is a cove with no road in, reached only by your own tender or the taxi boats that leave Gialos through the season. A cliff wall rises 300 metres behind the pebbles and shades the water after noon. The cliff is the reason to come, and the beach has nothing on it, so the villa packs everything for the day.

  8. The Chatziagapitos complex

    The Archaeological and Folklore Museum of Symi spreads over three levels in the Agios Athanasios neighbourhood of Chorio. Its eight buildings stand around the 18th-century Chatziagapitos mansion, built to a Venetian design for a merchant who was consul of Greece and Spain, and the Farmakidis House next door. The collections trace shipbuilding, sponge fishing, trade and domestic life across the floors above the courtyards; the museum opens daily except Tuesday, 8.30am to 3.30pm.

  9. Panormitis

    The Monastery of the Archangel Michael at Panormitis, on a sheltered bay at the southern tip and reached by road or by water, was rebuilt in the mid-18th century. Its bell tower, raised in 1911, is held locally to be the largest baroque bell tower in the world. The single-aisle church holds a silver-plated icon of the Archangel 2 metres tall, the inner courtyard is laid in pebble mosaic, and two small museums inside the walls show church art and island folk culture.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Gialos

    Gialos is the natural port of Symi, and the settlement rises around it in tiers, like an amphitheatre. Its port authority of record is the Municipal Port Fund of the South Dodecanese, seated at Rhodes, which administers the island’s two ports (Gialos and Pedi Bay) along with those of Rhodes, Karpathos, Kasos, Tilos, Halki and Kastellorizo. The whole of the lower town lies ashore from the stern.

  2. Pedi

    Pedi Bay is the second of the island’s two ports, and the one with a marina. Berths and mooring balls there are reserved in advance through the marina’s own platform rather than taken on arrival. The village at its head is a fishing settlement in a cove east of Chorio, and the foundations of an early Christian basilica lie on the shore beside it.

  3. Nimborios

    Nimborios is the island’s second natural harbour after Gialos, and is counted among the first ports Symi ever used: the ancient town of King Nireas, whose houses now stand almost on the beach. The road from Gialos reaches part of the way, and the rest is on foot from Harani. A vessel lying here has the north coast largely to itself.

  4. Panormitis

    Panormitis, the bay on the island’s south-western side, is a landfall in its own right: Dodekanisos Seaways lists Panormitis of Symi as a port of call separate from Symi itself. The Monastery of the Archangel Michael stands at the head of the water among cypress and pine. Caiques (traditional wooden boats) come down from Gialos, and the road arrives from behind.

  5. Nanou

    Nanou is the island’s day anchorage for vessels, and it can be reached only by boat. Marathounda is among the few Symi beaches a car can reach, and is busier for it. Taxi boats run from Gialos and from Pedi, the convenient starting point for the rest of the coast, and a tender makes the same water private.

  6. The agent

    Symi Tours has worked the Gialos waterfront since 1973. It is the oldest agency on the island and the one a visiting yacht deals through for berth reservations and port coordination, customs formalities in and out at the Symi Port Authority, bunkering (taking on fuel), provisioning and transfers for guests and crew. The Port Authority keeps its own office on the island.