Zanythos Island, Greece.

The islands are the main characteristic of Greece’s morphology and an integral part of the country’s culture and tradition. Greek sovereign land includes 6,000 islands and islets scattered in the Aegean and Ionian Seas, of which only 227 islands are inhabited. Most of the islands are in the Aegean seas, like Santorini, but we decided to visit Zakynthos island instead.

Not one of the well known islands of tourist Greece but it is the third largest island of the Ionian Sea, after Corfu and Kefaloniá, and internationally known as “Zante”. Looking into its history, Zákynthos is said to have been the island’s first inhabitant and the ancient acropolis is attributed to him. He was the son of Dardanos who ruled the ancient kingdom of Frigia. A Venetian fort was also built at later times on the site. It is classed as the beautiful green island in Greece, surrounded by the clear blue water of the the Ionian Sea. We can vouch for that one!

The Venetian architectural influence did leave its stamp..but looks totally out of place. The Venetians, who ruled Zákynthos from 1484 to 1797, called the island “Fioro di Levante” (flower of the East) as there are apparently over 7,000 species of flowers on Zákynthos. We did see many purple ones..but obviously being winter we were not going to see the range.

Our stay in Zákynthos was interesting. We treated ourselves to a lovely evening meal with a wonderful informative owner on our stay…and he informed us that the many attractions such as the blue caves would not be open due to it being winter.
He was right.

The next morning after breakfast we commenced our journey around the island.
Driving through many little towns, you could see the place was geared to providing lots of accommodation, eateries, and other pastimes for the tourists during summer, but in winter, everything was closed. In fact nothing was open in any of the little places we drove through (and definitely no public toilets to be seen anywhere Laura – thought I would mention that one). The coastline itself was dedicated to hotels, some you could see were well maintained, others were quite worn and old and perhaps did not open anymore, but you could visualise what it would look like in summer. They definitely catered for the summer tourist and there were extensive coastal tourist towns essentially void of life in the winter. The only exception was some minor activity around the wharfs in those towns that also had a fishing industry but that was it.

We found a sign that talked about the blue caves and took the plunge by heading down the many levels of steps to the sea…to see what we could see…( oh…there is a song like that !!) …and yes , with my bad ankle I walked down all these steps to the sea. Again, as we looked at the sun beds stacked, the shaded walkways, the unopened cafés etc, but still the clear clean deep blue water of the Mediterranean Sea. You could visualise the summer visitor or local using this place frequently then – today we were the only ones in sight.

The roads around the islands also lacked signage and although we had a map given to us to navigate with, thinking it would be a small island to discover, we found we had to turn on the GPS in order to find our way.!! Little roads that take you to all sorts of places…always with accompanying olive trees on the way, Marc was fascinated by the ages and shapes of some of these olive trees and we stopped to have a ‘photo look’ at a few. The trunks on some of the trees indicated that they were VERY old – venerable trees that, although of course they couldn’t be, seem to date back to ancient Greece.

One of the intriguing sights was finding this tiny little church, the church of San Pedro, on the side of the road. It was so tiny that Marc had to bend to go inside it. It dated back to the 10th century and was about 2.5 meters x 4 big. Yes,small, but still in use.

Our trip around (and up and over ) the island took us to the most northern part on the map where we viewed the blue caves and the shipwreck. We now know why they are called “blue caves”. Sunrays reflect through blue sea water from white stones of cave bottoms and walls, creating interesting effects. Added to that is lime dissolved into the water from the cliffs creating areas of near opaque light blue water next to the cliffs merging relatively abruptly with the clear deep blue water of the ocean. The contrast is very evident to us when we peered down from our viewing point from the ridge area from Anafonitria that has a small observation deck which overlooks the shipwreck. The shipwreck was basic but the colours are magnificent and as the sun came out even brighter. We took many many photos of the shipwreck, the scenery and the blue water/caves. Numerous “Blue Caves”, are cut into cliffs around Cape Skinari, and accessible only by small boats. We found a sign which said ‘boats depart every 10 minutes for the blue caves’ but they did not come even though we ‘waited’…..!!!
So we settled for the viewing of this magnificent natural scenery as best we could from the cliff tops.

Once this was viewed and the camera back in its bag, there was nothing remarkable left to be seen, except the Venetian influence in some towns still evident with odd clock towers built in the Venetian fashion appearing quite out of place adjacent to Greek houses and churches.

The whole island was easily circumnavigated in four hours including stops for walks down cliffs and the exploration of what views were there. The western part is all very harsh terrain (as occurs in many islands around the world) above high sea cliffs. Few settlements and little farming. The eastern side has the harbours, the ‘beaches’ (black/grey coarse sand), the farming areas and most of the towns. Apparently the place is over-run with British sun seekers in summer who come for 1-2 weeks at a time to swim in the resort pools, lie on the beach, and eat at the various eateries. Since for the winter traveller the first two are out, the island’s attractions can be exhausted in a day. Still, we are glad we did ‘do’ at least one Greek Island and we suspect that we would have had a similar experience if we had travelled to the ‘usual’ tourist islands of Santorini or Mykonos.

I was hoping to see whitewashed houses with bright blue trim and red roofs that you see on tourist posters. Well, no where have we seen houses painted like that so we suspect maybe we would of had to travel to Santorini for that. We did see white houses with pale blue trim. We saw lots of white houses with red roofs and quite a few apricot coloured houses with red roofs. None with deep blue trim. We did find on the island one house that was painted deep blue with white trim and a red roof – Marc wanted to take a photo since it was the exact opposite of what I was looking for but I said not to bother….not quite the same

We had intended catching the later ferry back to the mainland Greece, but decided to do an earlier one which proved fruitful as it meant we arrived in Patras in the waning daylight with sufficient time to find a hotel, kick back and get rid of the vibrations from the road while enjoying a few drinks in the rooftop bar of the hotel before going to bed.