Kastellorizo

Kastellorizo, officially Megisti, lies more than a hundred kilometres east of Rhodes and barely two from the Turkish coast, and it consists of one harbour town of a few hundred residents in tall houses painted red, ochre and blue around a deep bay, with a Knights' castle on the headland and a ruined upper town behind. Its population once exceeded ten thousand, sustained by shipping; emigration, mainly to Australia, emptied it, and Australian-Greek families return each summer. The island's natural wonder is the Blue Grotto at Perasta, a sea cave entered by lying flat in a small boat through a metre-high opening, opening into a chamber where refracted light turns the water an intense luminous blue, comparable with Capri's. The island appeared in the 1991 film Mediterraneo, which brought Italian visitors.

History

The island was colonised by Dorian Greeks, who called it Megiste, also known in antiquity as Cisthene, and the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax says it belonged to Rhodes. In the Hellenistic period the Rhodians built a dense network of watchtowers, with Kastellorizo, Ro and Strongyli as its main links, to watch the sea routes and the coast, and Palaiokastro was the largest fortified site; under Byzantium the island belonged to the Province of the Islands, with Rhodes as its capital, and later to the theme of the Aegean Sea (Wikipedia, Kastellorizo).

What's there

• The harbour - tall painted houses around a deep natural bay.
• The Blue Grotto - a sea cave of glowing blue water, entered lying down.
• The Knights' castle - the fortress above the town with its red rock.
• The Lycian tomb - a rock-cut tomb of Anatolian type above the harbour.

When to go

May, June, September and October; boat trips to the grotto run in calm morning conditions and are cancelled in swell. August brings the diaspora home and fills the few rooms.

Practical notes

Getting there is a long ferry or an expensive short flight, and connections are infrequent. The island is tiny with limited food and accommodation and no real beaches, only swimming from ladders and rocks. The grotto entrance is genuinely low and unsuitable for anyone claustrophobic.

Nearby

Rhodes is the main Greek connection; Kas on the Turkish coast is twenty minutes by boat where the crossing operates.

Key facts