Andros Island
Although Andros is second only to Naxos in size and historical importance, it is unlikely to be the first of the Kyklades you visit, if only because there is no direct ferry connection with Piraeus and there is no airport. So much out of the way does Andros seem at first sight that it may be the last of the group to claim attention. Yet it is only a two-hour passage from the modern port of Rafina on the east coast of Attica, and it practically touches the more popular island of Tinos to the south.
In many ways Andros is untypical of the Kyklades, but as the one with the most varied and largely unspoilt attractions it could be a pleasantly convenient introduction to them all. A green and well watered island, it is outstandingly beautiful in spring, mellow and still fresh in autumn. The mountainous interior confines the road system to the west coast and the two deep valleys which cross from west to east, but the roads are excellently engineered and surfaced, which means that buses, taxis and private transport can take you swiftly from one centre to another. The sandy beaches and warm sea-splashed rocks are ideal for swimming, except when (and this is the only warning) the ferocious north winds drive you inland for shelter.
It is the prevalence of these winds, more violent and unpredictable than the Etesian meltemU which have turned Gavrion into the princi¬pal harbour, rather than the mediaeval capital of Andros on the ex¬posed north-west coast. The harbour is a deep inlet within the wider Orrnos Gavriou, itself protected from the south by a fringe of islets, which with their rings of submerged rocks remind one of a coral reef guarding the entrance to the bay. The village behind the harbour is insignificant and unsightly, quite subordinate to the business of load¬ing and unloading vehicles and passengers on the quay.
Now that even the heaviest goods can be packed in lorries and transported in the gigantic holds of the modern ferries, you no longer see the various types of trading ships which used to frequent such a harbour. The old name vapori (’steamer’) for the commonest form of inter-island transport has given way to the less specific word karavi.
Happily the traditional design of the island ka’iki has survived, even though these graceful and practical boats now surge through the seas driven by powerful marine engines. The generic term varka (or vark-oula, according to size) is still used for the fishing boats, and the low flowing lines of their bulwarks, rising gently to stem and stem, are a familiar sight in the harbours of Andros and elsewhere. Despite their modern engines (I have sailed in one powered by a Lister marine engine made in Gloucestershire) the steersman still stands high in the stern, as in the days of sail, working the vertical rudder by a long wooden tiller, often nicely carved to give a good grip. It makes an inspiring silhouette against the morning or evening sunlight.
The fishing industry in the islands is highly organized these days. The larger boats are in radio contact with each other and their base, and companies often operate in groups of one large and two or three smaller boats. The parent boat may anchor offshore for her catch to be packed up in ice and transferred to the smaller ones, who will nip into harbour where lorries are waiting to transport the fish on board ferries bound for the mainland. This explains why the larger fish are hard to find (and very expensive) in island restaurants, which rely on the little open boats you see everywhere round the coast.
Landing inevitably at Gavrion, you are most likely to travel by bus or taxi the five miles down the coast to Batsi, which is a very different kind of place. There are few scenes in the islands more suitable for a summer holiday - a bright and cheerful town built round a sand-lined bay and well sheltered from the north. A mainly red-roofed old quarter climbs the hill to the south, and overlooks the small but busy fishing quay. There is a backing of shapely mountains, and a choice of hotels and attractive villas for the tourist. Within easy reach between Batsi and Gavrion are more fine sandy beaches, and with all these advantages it is not surprising that there is a real danger in summer of overdevelopment and overcrowding. However, if beaches get too crowded there are accommodating rocks to lie on out of sight of everyone - the writer doing just this one day had his best view yet of the Aegean kingfisher, a blue flash round the rock into a hole in the cliff behind. The alkyon, whose ‘halcyon days’ of winter are proverbial, is a reality whatever its breeding season.
Another five miles along the coast road to the south from Batsi was the ancient city and one-time capital, Palaiopolis, founded in the seventh century BC. It has been much written up in the guidebooks, and in the late nineteenth century Theodore Bent could write:
When the temples and public buildings stood here it must have been one of those ideal places which we see depicted on theatrical drop-scenes. Everything that nature can provide is granted to this spot. Behind it rise the precipitous heights of Mount Petalos. Two clear streams dash down the slopes amidst olives, cypresses and lemons, which grow in profusion here. Below is the sea - and not a breath of that biting north wind which had tormented us so on the heights - everything was genial and pleasant except, perhaps, the interior of the peasant’s house where we had to sleep.
Bent’s description reminds us that the Greeks were the most brilliant site-choosers in history. Imagine the good fortune that gave men of good taste and sensibility the chance to build in an almost virgin world, unsullied canvases for their temples, theatres and cities. In the case of Palaiopolis it was also a natural and practical choice, because (as will be seen) its founders came from an arid site not far away on the same coast, while here they had water which still flows without stint or interruption.
The site is indeed magnificent, but of the extensive classical town which crowded its steep slopes there is hardly a trace today. Soil has washed down from the mountain above to cover its remains, and terraced olive patches conceal all but a length of strongly built acropolis wall. To reach this you have to leave the end of the concrete track leading down from the modern village from the main road, and follow a long sequence of overgrown steps and stony paths. Your first sight of antiquity may be a group of three huge blocks of stone by a water tank - all that survives of one of the gateways to the town below.
The proof that there were once streets, houses and marble-columned temples here lies in the fine new Archaeological Museum in the Chora of Andros town, where among many marble fragments you can see a statue of Hermes - a second-century copy of a Praxiteles original - dug out of this hillside by a farmer in 1833. It seems likely that the soil was washed down further to form a narrow alluvial plain which all but obliterated the harbour. Today it is only possible to beach a few small fishing boats on the foreshore.
The coastal road south from Gavrion is one of the loveliest in the Kyklades. It follows the enfolding lines of the hills at a considerable height, with trees and rich vegetation above and below. The coastline here faces mainly south-west, and across a wide blue channel you can see the clear outlines of other island sisters. Closest is Giaros, which looks interesting, but being waterless is almost uninhabited. To
the left of Giaros is the more familiar outline of Syros, to the right the long irregular shape of Kea, first in the chain of the western Kyk¬lades. In between, and shadowy against the midday sun, you can make out Kythnos, while to the right of Kea begins the eastern coastline of Attica, from Pentelikon down to Cape Sounion. The Archipelago is a family concern, like so much of Greek life.
After rounding the 3000-feet massif of Mt Petalon the road di¬vides at a point known as Stavropeda (’crossways’). Most of the traffic will turn left here for Andros town, or Chora as it is still generally called. Once over the watershed the road drops down the wide and fruitful valley of Messaria. On either side of it scattered villages appear in green settings, while down in the depths a massed regiment of tall cypresses shields the floor of the valley from the north winds which bring the waves bristling into the harbour beyond.
Andros Chora is an unusual town, and one of the best kept in the islands. The oldest part occupies a rocky tongue of land between two bays, and it was here that Marino Dandolo, nephew of the Doge of Venice who engineered the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, built a strong castle - strong enough for its final tower to have survived the attacks of wind and waves for nearly eight hundred years. A jagged foursquare ruin, its base is a rocky islet joined to the narrow headland by a curious high-arched bridge.
The seventeenth-century English traveller Randolph describes what he saw here: ‘The inhabitants are all Greeks, having a good large town to the north-east with no other walls but those of their houses, which join together. At the end of the lanes are Gates, which every night are shut to keep out the Privateers.’ Andros owed its considerable prosperity in the Middle Ages and later to its remark¬able fertility, and not least to a silk industry based on a widespread plantation of mulberry trees. According to Randolph, in some years they made more than 3000 lbs of silk.
The upper Chora is a later foundation, but an attractive and sensi¬ble one. The long sloping main street is closed to traffic and paved with large smooth slabs, swept clean every day. At the lower end the Plateia Kairis, shaded by wide-branched plane trees, extends at right angles, and a good restaurant overlooks the southern bay and its long sandy beach. From here an arched gateway leads into the old walled town, or Kato Kastro, and as this narrows to a point you reach the windswept Plateia Riva, where a huge bronze statue of an ‘unknown seaman’ rocks disconcertingly on his heels when he meets the gale head on.
On the left of the main street, just before the Plateia Kairis, is the Archaeological Museum, one of the finest small museums in Greece. Its scope is limited, and the greater part of the exhibition is taken up with finds from the early Geometric site of Zagora, which occupies a headland just south of the Stavropeda crossroads. This was the earliest settlement discovered in Andros, apart from vestiges of a Mycenaean presence in the Bronze Age. Legends of a Cretan occupation are too sketchy to convince, and a Phoenician presence would be limited to traders on their constant errands across the Mediterranean.
When Zagora was excavated by the Athens Archaeological Society and a team from the University of Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s, it proved to be a unique find - a self-contained town estab¬lished by Ionian colonists about 900 BC which flourished until its evacuation in 700 BC, after which the site was never disturbed. The pottery and small objects displayed in the Museum show the high
level of artistic civilization the Ionians brought with them or devel¬oped. In our appreciation of the glories of Periclean Athens we tend to overlook the charm and skills of the Geometric and Archaic peri¬ods which led the way. As one of the excellent charts in the Museum reminds us, we owe to those times the introduction of the Greek alphabet (which they owed to those Phoenician traders) and the po¬etry of Homer - as well as the first celebration of the Olympic Games, traditionally put in 776 BC. The whole exhibition is beauti¬fully set out and catalogued. The same is true of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a modem building in one of the byways of the Kato Kastro, and the Maritime Museum down on the Plateia Rival. The loyalty to Andros of its natives who have prospered abroad has been shown by their support for these and all kinds of undertakings, great and small.
The Archaeological Museum was finished in 1981, thanks to the generosity of two of them, Basil and Elise Goulandris, and its open¬ing was marked by the return from Athens of its most famous exhibit, the marble Hermes from Palaiopolis. This is the centrepiece of the ground floor exhibits, which include marble fragments of the Classi¬cal and Hellenistic periods also found at Palaiopolis, the site almost certainly occupied by the population of Zagora when - for whatever reason - they abandoned the earlier town.
The site of Zagora is fascinating, and not difficult to find. Five hundred yards beyond Stavropeda in the direction of Korthi, a path to the right between stone walls leads first past a small church and then up and down hill - it takes about forty minutes to walk it - until you emerge on to a curious flattened promontory, sloping gently back to the north. Surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs descending to the sea, the only other defence it needed was a cleverly built wall with just one narrow and easily covered entrance, while ships could be beached in a deep sandy bay to the north.
Three main groups of houses were discovered, of uniform and practical design, and clear reconstructions of them are illustrated in the Museum Guide. The most interesting and best preserved building is the temple, a touchingly small forerunner of the great pillared structures of the sixth and fifth centuries. Only the ground plan survives, the size of a large house, beautifully built of finely cut schist stone and divided simply into a plain pronaos, or antechamber, and a cella with a rough altar in the centre. The roof, as in all the houses, was flat, supported on wooden columns (the stone bases survive) with a ceiling of natural wood poles carrying heavy schist
slabs and scaled by a layer of waterproof clay. This kind of roofing can still be seen in countless houses and small churches in Andros and other islands.
Why was such a marvellous site abandoned? Enemy attack or earthquake must be ruled out, for the new settlement at Palaiopolis was far less defensible and just as susceptible to earth tremors. Most probably it was the failure of the water supply, which depended on catchment cisterns for rain water, or long journeys to fetch spring water from elsewhere. There are no springs on the headland itself, while at Palaiopolis water gushes liberally from the hillside. Even so the new site was not far away, and Zagora was not entirely aban¬doned, for the temple and its surrounding sanctuary was maintained and used at least for another two hundred years by the descendants of those who built it. In fact the latest form of the temple as revealed by the excavation is probably a sixth-century building, not unlike a temple of that date found at Emborio in Chios. Both seem to have heen dedicated to Athena, the most popular Olympian of the Archaic period in those parts.
With one exception the other places worth visiting in Andros have a mediaeval origin. The exception is an extraordinary circular tower which stands near the head of the valley above Gavrion near the hamlet of Agios Petros. Although the natural stone blends with the stony hillside behind, the tower can be clearly seen from the main road below, and is easily reached by way of the road signposted to Vitali at the back of Gavrion. At first sight it seems to be a homoge¬neous construction, rising to about 65 feet with window spaces repre¬senting five distinct storeys, and most authorities classify it either vaguely as ‘Hellenic’ or mistakenly as ‘Hellenistic’.
In fact, if you look closely you will see that the stones forming the lower courses are colossal and roughly put together, whereas the upper part which forms the tower is built of smaller, carefully graded stones tapering towards the top. The entrance on the south side is low, enclosed by two huge stone jambs and a lintel, and it leads directly into a domed chamber rising to about 20 feet in the centre. You look up - and you could imagine yourself inside the ‘Tomb of Agamemnon’ at Mycenae! True, the entrance is lower, and lacks the triangular weight-bearer above it, but the external and internal stone¬work is Mycenaean or Pelasgian in scale and style.
So what do we have? Why not an original tholos or ‘beehive’ chamber, possibly a royal tomb of that period, on whose massive foundations later builders have added a more useful structure,
perhaps a fortified look-out tower to command the approaches to Gavrion? In any case there was no connection between the domed chamber and the upper storeys - you had to climb through a gap made in the roof of the entry passage to reach a series of stone stairways, spiralling round the inside of the tower. This left the lower chamber totally enclosed, and it could have been retained as a refuge for animals. As far as one knows the floor has never been excavated. The two chief mediaeval monuments of Andros are the monaster¬ies of Zoodochos Pigi and Panachrantou. The former is not far from the tower of Agios Petros, and can be reached either by a fairly stiff climb from the main road behind Batsi - it lies just over the brow of the hill at the head of a typical walled pathway, or dromaki -or more easily (if you can persuade a taxi driver to tackle a roughish road) by way of an unmarked turning halfway between Batsi and Gavrion. Thought to have been originally a Byzantine school, it was converted to a monastery during the fourteenth century. Theodore Bent had a warm welcome from the monks in the 1800s, but it declined after the First World War and in 1928 it became a convent for nuns.
Only a few nuns are left of the sixty who were a happy community here thirty years ago, but the Mother Superior is a distinguished figure, well educated and a good linguist. The name Zoodochos Pigi, ‘Life-giving Spring’, often explains the choice of a site for a Chris¬tian church. Next to the monastery church is a marble fountain, from which flows the agiasma, a miraculous stream of water. Inside the church is a delightful ikon worked in fine petit-point embroidery, embellished with gold and silver thread, of which the subject is a miracle wrought by the holy water. A man lies spreadeagled on his back while the water is poured on his head from a pitcher, and a vigorous little black devil shoots out of his mouth in defeat. The southern range of the mediaeval fortress-like walls survives, with one dramatic ruined tower. The inner precincts have a sad decaying charm.
The Panachrantou monastery is in a wilder and more remote situ¬ation, just over the top of the mountain ridge which separates the valleys of Messaria and Korthi. The long trek up from the bottom of the Messaria valley is no longer necessary, for a rough road over the mountain branches off the new highway between Andros Chora and the southern harbour of Korthi, near the village of Exo Vouni. It is a very rough track at present, and horribly steep in places, but a weekly tourist bus which leaves Gavrion in the early morning brings visitors
most of the way. Even in summer it is a grim place to come to, but inside it is more cheerful and domestic, and there is a spectacular view down the Messaria valley and out to sea beyond Andros har¬bour. The senior monk is a genial character and will show you round the complicated interior. Founded possibly as early as the tenth cen¬tury, it is like a small village, with two principal churches (both later foundations) and narrow lanes connecting the monastic buildings.
You can reach the bay of Korthi either by this way from the Chora or by continuing straight on past the Stavropeda crossroads from Batsi. In the first case the road continues past Exo Vouni and in its descent it passes three sites which must have been important in mediaeval times. First comes a rock-crowned peak above the village of Kochylou, where at nearly 2000 feet you can make out the ruined walls and two towers of a considerable fortress - the Epanokastro (’upper castle’) and the final refuge of the dwellers in the Korthi valley. Further down on the left, below the road, you pass the signifi¬cantly named Palaiokastro (’ancient castle’) and soon afterwards the equally significant Episkopio (’look-out place’) above the road on the right. The three places must have been a chain of defensive positions subordinate to the Kato Kastro of the capital.
The two villages are worth exploring if you have the time. In Palaiokastro the most obvious building is the Byzantine church of Christos, but behind it are the remains of a largely deserted medi¬aeval village. Episkopio is more substantial, with the ruins of large mediaeval houses and towers, dwarfing small modem villas sur¬rounded by orchards and well watered vegetable plots. A lane leads through it past a mediaeval arcaded washplace to a leafy ravine where water still flows past a ruined mill - the only watermill I remember seeing in the islands, apart from the ’sea-mills’ on Kephalonia.
Down in Korthi one is reminded of a fishing village in the west of Scotland. An uncompromising stone-paved street runs parallel to the sea, with glimpses of it through narrow alleyways. It makes a better harbour than Andros town, with two breakwaters to shelter it from the north. There is a plain grey stone hotel, quite a number of rooms to let in summer, and a long sandy beach stretching away to the south.
We have left to the last the modem aspect of the beautiful Mes¬saria valley, and the sequence of lovely villages which line its south-em slopes. Messaria itself is a busy little place almost joined to the outskirts of the Chora, with a main street which gets frequently jammed by lorries, but gives a friendly passage to donkeys. The main
church of Agios Nikolaos has been dully modernized, but a lane opposite leads to the delightful twelfth-century one of the Taxiarch Michailis. This has been stripped of its disfiguring whitewash, and you can see both the beauty of its natural stonework and the elegance of its later marble doorway. An inscription in the church records that it was built in 1158, during the reign of the Emperor Manuel Com-nenus, and therefore by a strange calculation 6666 years after the creation of the world.
The line of hill villages begins in the north with Stenies, overlook¬ing from some height the harbour and sandy bay of the same name. This is a village paradise, with tiers of well built houses rising in stages round the folds of the hillside, sunny and sheltered even in the blustering north winds. Winding lanes connect houses on each level, and flowery gardens alternate with luscious orchards - lemons, or¬anges, almonds, quinces, figs, walnuts and pomegranates. No traffic is allowed or possible, though buses and cars can reach either end of the village.
Next in line is Ipsilou, a poor relation as it were of Stenies. The situation is just as beautiful and even more peaceful, but the houses are poorer and more dilapidated. Water gushes in channels and spouts from top to bottom, wild cyclamen grow in the cracks of the steps, and if you follow one channelled stream downhill you come to another Byzantine church dedicated to the Taxiarch Michailis. The Archangel Michael was obviously a special patron of Andros. This church was built in the eleventh century, but has been modernized within. Above Ipsilou is Apoikia, better known because of the famous Sariza mineral water it produces. It has two hotels, but except for its position and superb views it is less attractive than its neigh¬bours. Below again is Lamira, now a more sophisticated through still attractive village, and from here you regain the main road up the valley.
Almost at once a short side road takes you to Menites, a naturally beautiful spring-watered hamlet, deeply shaded and cool in midsum¬mer. A mile or two further on you see above the road the beautifully proportioned white shape of yet another Taxiarch Michailis identified with the nearby village of Melida. This forms part of the cemetery of Pitrophoros; beyond the west end there is a delightful domed ossuary to contain the bones of the departed when room can no longer be found for them in the ground. Apart from that it is another good example of eleventh-century Byzantine work, and even the blanket¬ing effect of total whitewash fails to conceal the beauty of its lines.
Although there is a good bus service operating between Chora, Gavrion, Batsi and Korthi, Andros is a big enough island to warrant hiring a car or moped. This enables you to turn aside at will, explore more distant places, and enjoy one of the most welcoming country¬sides the islands can present to the traveller. Apart from its trees, its flowers and its springs of fresh water, man has contributed a collec¬tion of decorative dovecotes bettered only in Tinos, and a unique system of dry stone walling. This interrupts the line of the wall every three or four feet with a triangular slab set on its broad end, lined with smaller stones to wedge it in, thus preventing any tendency of the wall to collapse laterally. For hundreds of miles this walling, still in good condition, surrounds the fields and lanes and orchards, and marches over the hills in all directions. The labour of building it passes belief, but it is one of the chief features of Andros.
You will notice too that there are as many horses here as donkeys, as well as plenty of cattle in the fertile valleys. When you do see donkeys, as often as not the riders will be seated astride at a purpose¬ful canter instead of being slumped across the saddle drumming with their heels against the animal’s flanks. Altogether life seems more open and confident, less of a struggle, perhaps, than elsewhere. The Andriot responds in a detached manner to the visitor, but with a slow-kindling warmth and a gentleness you do not always find in islands where life is harder. They are proud of their island, which preserves its own charm and dignity in all seasons.