Ikaria Island
Ikaria is a strange island. Its long and rugged mountain backbone leaves little room for life along the south coast, though towards its northern end the mountains withdraw just enough to admit the small harbour of Agios Kirikos, which is where the ferries call daily on their way to Samos and back. This is a business-like harbour, backed by little more than a friendly village where everybody knows every¬body and tourists are for once outnumbered. At the end of the quay stands a thirty-foot-high piece of modern bronze sculpture; between two huge pointed wings the forlorn body of Icarus plunges downwards. Commissioned a few years ago by an Ikarian family, it illustrates the overwhelming local belief that it was into the Ikario Pelagos, the sea enclosed by Ikaria, Patmos and the Phourni islands, that the son of the inventor Daedalus fell as they were escaping from the service of King Minos of Crete - the wax hinges of his wings melting as he flew too near the sun. Why bother to derive the island’s name from a Phoenician word for fish when you have a myth like that to call upon? Behind the harbour a green valley rises in a series of terraces as the mountains tail off towards the north, white houses and churches peering through the screen of cypress, fig and olive. Here you would think is a place to enjoy simple rural Greek life, away from the crowds of Samos or Mytilene. You would not be altogether wrong, but that is not what Greek visitors come for in their thousands from all over the Aegean. Just round the point from Agios Kirikos is another bay with a gravelly beach and a busy village behind. Tiers of modern houses climb the steep hillside to the south; thronged cafe terraces overlook the beach and the little wooden pier which projects into the harbour. This is Therma, where warm radio-active mountain springs would flow naturally into the sea, but are now channelled and piped through the public thermal baths which men and women come to enjoy from as far away as Crete. It makes an extraordinary sight, and ‘enjoy’ seems not really the right word as you watch the daily processions of mournful invalids from their hotels and rooms and trees is made up for by the low-growing red-foliaged shrubs which crowd the slopes on either side of the road. The village itself is concealed over the brow of the final rise, but just before that you see on your right the conspicuous white shape of the Panagia monastery spreading along a ridge above the road. Its church, like all churches in Pholegandros, has an unusually flattened cupola. The monastery occupies a fine site, which as so often hap¬pened was taken over by the Christian church from the pagan god¬dess Artemis. Unfortunately to protect its treasures from theft its doors are no longer opened to visitors. As in Sikinos there are two parts to the Chora, here known as meso (’inside’) and exo (’outside’). Yet this is not like any other Kykladic capital. You have the immediate impression that here is a self-sufficient community, isolated from other island centres for cen¬turies, which has kept up a serene standard of life owing nothing to any other source, least of all the tourist. The upland fields look fertile, with figs and vines and strips of arable land; the people you meet are civil and friendly but clearly content with their own ways. You first come to exo, which has a number of good-looking houses grouped round three main squares, with several of these flat-domed churches intervening. Two of the squares are leafy and quiet. The larger one has a central plantation of flowering trees, where patient donkeys wait for their owners to leave the cafe tables. A smaller one has a paved area in the centre, shaded by several kinds of tree, with a well in the middle - a perfect place for children to play, or gravely watch their elders drawing water. Lastly you come to a busier plateia, with a cafe on one side and a civilized restaurant on the other. Here you will meet the discriminating visitors who have found rooms to stay in, and you can drink the local retsina by the carafe. The churches scattered all around are well kept and have each of them some special feature or shape, adornment or external carving, and always this curiously flattened dome - as though one architect had imposed a style on them all. Again their presence in such numbers argues prosperity as well as a communal spirit. The meso part of the village is what is left of the old kastro - a main street unusually wide for the Kyklades, with white cubist houses rising irregularly on either side, some up steps, some down, but all with bright flowery balconies or tubs. Low arches lead to more secluded side streets, and at the far end you fetch up on a narrow terrace overlooking a glorious seascape - a drop of nearly a thousand feet to the waves which break on the rocks below, with lained road which runs from Agios Kirikos up through the green combes, round the tip of the mountains, then down in wide sweeps to I he north coast. The views are splendid all the way, and if you stop among the heathery slopes of the watershed you can see the head of Mt Kerketeus on Samos towering across the sea. At this point you will notice that the rock formation has changed to horizontal strata of (lat schist slabs showing very near the surface, and nearly all the older houses on this side of the island are roofed in heavy slates which are quarried here. The Greeks call them plakes, and they are even bigger and heavier than you find on Skopelos in the northern Sporades - immovably secure in wind and rain, but heavy to fix or replace. You first make contact again with the coast at Karavostamo, which is being not very convincingly developed as a holiday base. This northern coast is more amenable to development, particularly when you reach the town and harbour of Evdilos. There is more here for the visitor than at Agios Kirikos, so far without spoiling its character as a major fishing harbour, though the big ships berth here too twice a week during the season. Evdilos lies at the foot of the only fertile valley which penetrates any distance into the central mountains, and between here and Ar-menistis on the far north-western promontory the country is lovely. You could wander for days among the inland villages, and a reason¬able road takes buses as far as Armenistis. This was where one of the island’s few classical sites was discovered, a fifth-century sanctuary of Artemis Tavropolos. This attribute does not connect the goddess directly with the rearing of bulls, but links her sanctuary and temple with the one at Tauris in the Crimea where Iphigeneia was trans¬ported after the attempted sacrifice at Aulis. However, coins discov¬ered here do show a bull on the reverse side to the head of Artemis, together with the name OINOI. The name Ikaria does not appear in any form on the coins, but two miles inland from Evdilos is a place called Oinon, once the most important town in the island. Now Oinoe or Oenoe is a common name in the Aegean, but oinos is the ancient Greek word for wine, and vines grow abundantly in this part of Ikaria. Indeed, it was once almost as famous for its wines as Samos, and the head of Dionysus appears on another of the coins found near Armenistis. The acropolis of Oinon is easy to find beside the road about a mile beyond the village of Kambos. There are no fortifications to be seen, though there are the remains of a small odeion which was later incorporated within the palatia, or mediaeval governor’s residence. Today there is more interest in the eleventh-century church of Agia Irene and its surroundings. It was built on the site of a very early Byzantine church of the fourth century, of which the mosaic floor is said to be preserved under the present courtyard. You enter this unusual and charming place through a Roman gateway, and beside it there is an excellent little museum with finds from neolithic to Ro¬man and Byzantine times. There are some quite undamaged small jars with both geometric and red-figure decoration, but the best thing there is a slim, delicately moulded hermaphrodite torso in marble, probably Hellenistic. It seems extraordinary to find such feeling in a limbless trunk. Ikaria could never be sultry. The air of the mountains is exhilarating, and the seas around are constantly refreshing to mind and spirit, even without the radio-active springs. If you should want to explore fur¬ther, an excursion boat leaves Agios Kirikos on one or two mornings a week (regularly on Sundays when the weather is fine)