Scattered around the blue waters of the Ionian and the
Aegean Seas, the Greek Islands are one of Europe’s
favourite holiday destinations.
 Megan McCormick begins her journey with a boat trip
to the island of Hydra, where the annual
Miaoulia Festival is taking place.
The festival, which takes place in June, celebrates
the fight for Greek independence from Turkey around
1800. The islanders dress up in period costume and they
re-enact the events of a glorious sea-battle, when they
wreaked havoc by sending small rowing boats packed with
explosives amongst the Turkish battle ships. After the
explosions have died down, the dancing continues throughout
the night.
From Hydra Megan journeys to Patmos,
one of the Dodecanese Islands close to Turkey. Patmos
is seen as a sacred place to many Christians, and is
the only place in Europe where God was said to have
appeared on earth. St John was exiled here in 95AD and
heard the voice which prompted him to write the Book
of Revelations. The cave that was his home is now the
focal point for pilgrims, and there has been a monastery
on Patmos since 1088. The monks have always been influential
in the running of the island and consequently it has
remained very peaceful and laid back. Octopus is a favourite dish on Patmos, and Megan joins a local
fisherman who sells his catch to local restaurants.
That evening she samples the different ways in which
the dishes are prepared.
Megan retraces her steps back to Athens,
then boards a boat for Mykonos from
the port at Piraeus. Mykonos has a reputation for being
glamorous and expensive, and people come here  for the
wild night life and the beaches. Nonetheless, Megan
hires a motorbike and discovers an isolated spot on
the north coast of the island. She heads back into town
for the evening, and samples the relentless nightlife.
Next morning, Megan takes a 20 minute boat trip to
nearby Delos. The birthplace of the
god Apollo, the tiny island was a sacred site but soon
became a wealthy, independent free port. The site at
Delos dates back 5000 years, and although only a third
of the island has been excavated, it’s one of the
most important archaeological areas in the whole of
Greece.
From here, Megan continues her voyage to the island
of Santorini, another archaeological
gem. Around 1650 BC one of the largest volcanic eruptions
ever took place on this island. Magma shot up 22 miles
into the sky and it created a tidal wave that went all
the way to Israel. The ancient Minoan city of Akrotiri was buried under 120 feet of ash and archaeologists
are continually making new discoveries.
Next stop is Crete, the largest of
the Greek Islands which even in antiquity developed
an independent culture of its own. Megan canoes up the
coast to the former leper colony at Spinalonga, then
continues to the former Venetian enclaves of Souda
Bay and Hania, where she visits
the war cemetery, final resting place of many of the
victims who fell during the 1931 invasion by the Turks.
One of the high-lights of a trip to Crete is hiking
the Samaria Gorge. It’s the largest
gorge in Europe and during the summer months several
thousand people make the hike each day. The  gorge gets
its name from the Church of St. Maria or Samaria which
was at the centre of the village which was abandoned
when the gorge became a National Park in 1962.
The last place Megan visits is the tiny island of Gavdos.
Located about 50 miles south of Crete, Gavdos is the
most southerly landmass in Europe and only 250 miles
from Libya. Legend has it that this is where Odysseus
was shipwrecked and spent 7 years under the spell of
the beautiful Calypso, who fed him on aphrodisiac berries
that you can still find all over the island. Megan ends
her Greek island-hopping experience on the stunning
beach at Agios Yannis. |
