92 AUGUST 2019 / TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM
bank of clouds, like a diva who’d decided to refuse the
crowd an encore. I could almost feel the disappointment
emanating from the cliffs. Then suddenly, the sun
emerged, plunging spectacularly into the sea, leaving a
trail of cotton-candy pink and powder blue clouds, not to
mention a mass of relieved spectators, in its wake.T
HOUGH IT IS JUST an hour away by jet
boat, Folegandros feels like Santorini’s polar
opposite: quiet, understated, almost
timeless. The island is tiny—with a
population of less than 800—yet despite its
small scale, the landscape is big on drama. Like the other
islands in the archipelago, Folegandros is a partially
submerged mountain, whose sheer northern side plunges
straight into the sea. From the Church of Panagia, or the
Virgin Mary, which sits at the top of a strenuous
switchbacked path above the tiny capital, Chora, you can
take in most of the island. It stretches out in a narrow
finger to the west, the traces of abandoned farming
terraces still visible on its arid flanks, and forms a
distinctive hourglass shape that is pinched, in the
middle, to a width of just a few hundred yards.
From this lookout, the village of Chora seemed
absurdly small, yet at night, its tiny alleys became
mazelike. One evening I got quite lost in its backstreets
after enjoying a negroni under the bougainvillea of a
local bar. It took me a few moments to realize that all I
needed to do to reorient myself was look up at the Church
of Panagia on the hillside above the town. Once I did that,
I quickly found my way back to the trio of tree-shaded
central squares, where locals and tourists chatted over
fragrant plates of souvlaki and bottles of Mythos beer.Folegandros is so small that I was able to drive its
entire length in about 15 minutes in my rental car. The
farther I got from Chora, the more the 21st century
seemed to slip away. I passed farmers riding donkeys or
using them to carry precious water to their crops. When
an islander talked to me about the changes brought on by
the industrial revolution, he wasn’t talking about the
1820s, but rather the electrification that arrived in 1974.
Sitting on my balcony one evening, I watched as a single
pair of headlights traveled the length of the island’s main
road and vanished, plunging the scene back into a deep,
arcadian silence.I
ARRIVED ON MILOS at the end of the
summer season, on the tail of a Mediterranean
cyclone. So unusual was this event in Greece that
it had given rise to a new portmanteau: medicane.
But despite dire warnings, the storm, christened
Zorba, had left Milos unscathed. The only obvious effect
was that the startling colors of the water—turquoise,
lapis, periwinkle—had taken on a milky hue.
I was staying at Milos Breeze, an elegant, understated
boutique hotel overlooking the tiny village of Pollonia, on
the island’s northeastern tip. Through the wooden
shutters of my whitewashed room, I could hear waves,
stirred up by the storm, breaking on the nearby shore.
The hotel’s co-owner, Dimitris Vamvakaris, warned me
that Milos’s charms were not as overt as those of its more
famous neighbor. It took a bit of effort to get to know the
place. “You don’t have everything in front of you,” he
said. “You have to explore the island.”
Mindful of Dimitris’s warning, I met up the next
morning with Alexandros Kiziriadis, a local guide.
Originally from Athens, Alexandros fell for Milos when
he spent his honeymoon on the island in 1978. Now a
handsome man in his sixties, with swept-back curly gray
locks, Alexandros is still happily married, and his love
for Milos remains not only passionate but monogamous:
he could barely bring himself to admit any other island
was worth visiting at all. “Eh,” he said, when I mentioned
any other part of the Cyclades. “It’s not the best.”
Much of the western half of Milos now falls under an
environmental initiative called Natura 2000, a Europe-
wide conservation project begun in 1992 that protects the
continent’s most beautiful spaces. This wild,
undeveloped part of the island is accessible only by
four-wheel drive. Alexandros drove us out west on
unpaved roads, through a landscape of tiny one-room
chapels, goats, and lone farmsteads. Sixteen kilometers
down a twisting dirt road we came to an empty beach
called Ammoudaraki. Over a picnic lunch, Alexandros
tried—unsuccessfully—to teach me the Greek alphabet.
“This one is i,” he said. “This one is also i. This one is o;
this one is o. This one and this one together make i.”
Ammoudaraki is my platonic ideal of a beach: beside
the crystalline blue water is a fringe of pale sand lined
with myrtle bushes. A hundred meters offshore, the tiny,
sphinx-shaped island of Antimilos rises up from the
translucent water. Even in the height of summer,A dish of local cheese,
bacon and an egg at
Pounta restaurant,
on Folegandros.