Skíros (Part 3)

The following morning, on 10 July, we took our trusty scooter up the steepest hills to reach a vantage point by an old chapel. George had suggested that it was a great place to watch the sun rise...

... but we opted for a little longer in bed and contented ourselves with just fantastic, rather than stupendous, views in the early-ish morning light.

Palamari

Model of the Palamari site

We drove into the centre of the island and up the better roads so that we got to our next stop in time. Only open in the mornings, the ancient archaelogical site of Palamari on the northeast corner of Skíros and we were keen to visit it. The island is strategically placed in the centre of the Aegean sea and was an important crossroads for trade shipping for millenia. Staggeringly, some of the lowest levels of the settlements date from as early as the pre-Bronze Age, 4000 years BC.

When we walked out onto the site we thought that the fortifications were very impressive for such an early settlement. These semi-circular bastions date from at about 2000 years BC but, we thought, wouldn’t have looked too out of place as part of a Napoleonic fort. Palamari was clearly both an important and a very wealthy place to have been so well defended.

Inside the walls you could see where the archaeologists had excavated some houses. There was a reconstruction of how one to show how the small cuboid houses would have looked which was helpful. What was particularly interesting was that the same the construction methods were still in use until the relatively recent advent of concrete last century. Paved streetways and communal drainage systems have been excavated and there was clearly a sophisticated system of government in place to organise and to pay for this infrastructure.

Looking inland we could clearly see the silted up lagoon which used to be an extended part of the harbour. Reeds from the reedbeds beyond would have been used in the construction of the flat roofs with hard-setting mud and sand laid on top.

All over the site it was apparent how complex the construction had been. Tunnels and walkways enabled defenders to move freely behind the defences and there were also signs that rock tanks and drainage had been put in place. All in all it was a really interesting place to look at and quite amazing to discover such an advanced construction and organised society from four and a half thousand years ago. Perhaps even more exciting is that the excavations are very much ongoing; they were only started in 1981 and even then could only continue because the people of Skíros funded the follow-on excavations themselves. Now that the excavations are being continued under wider national control, who knows what else will be discovered here below the ground we have just been walking on.

Atsitsa – a centre of spiritual energy

With our ‘must see’ site of Palamari visited we rode anti-clockwise around the coast, past the military airbase (and civil airoport) and down the northwestern side of the island to Atsitsa. The area is purported to be a centre of spiritual enegy and the village attracts tourists from all over the world who come here for yoga holidays in particular.

We thought it was a beautiful spot and stopped for some refreshment at the café on the promontory to the south of the village. Here, the views out over the nearby islands and the rocky shore were breathtaking.

We were a little puzzled by the aquaduct-like pillars which are located all around the café and seem to reach out towards the island. We asked the staff in the café and all was explained. In the late 1800s a German mining company extracted iron ore from the open mine nearby and our ‘aquaduct’ ruins were actually the supprting legs for a bridgeway which enabled the ore trucks to be pushed out from the mine for loading onto ships. The black and white photo in the café showed the wooden bridgeway which preceded the stone one of which we saw the ruins.

Spiritual energy centre or not we had a very pleasant break from riding and afterwards were refreshed and ready to make our way back to Linariá. We had to route via the petrol station so that we handed the scooter back with a full tank; a whole 2.8 litres were squeezed in this time. On handing back the keys we realised that we had driven 140 km on the scooter using just 4.5 litres of petrol. Pretty efficient considering that we had spent a long time at full throttle climbing up the steep hills and that there were two of us on it.

We’d packed a lot into 2 days but we knew that we needed to head west again in BV to meet up with Charlotte and Sophie. We have missed out on seeing a couple of museums and several other sites on the island but we know that we will be back. We found that Skíros has a different feel to it than the other islands and we really enjoyed it as a place to visit.

For now, however, we were looking at the favourable wind forecast for 11 July which we hoped would get us quickly back west, on our way to Volos.

Skíros, Greece