THE KARYSTOS CHRONICLES  

 

 

 

A tan man with a white towel wrapped around his waist, doubtfully a tourist, emerges from the sliding glass door of his hotel room balcony, across a narrow alley and four floors below me. Despite the early hour he takes a long, pregnant drag on a cigarette. Maybe he just got out of the shower but — the island’s heavy July air makes for an inscrutable cloak — the aura is more suggestive of exhaustion than refreshment.

 

From the opposite direction, looking south from my rooftop perch opposite the police station, I watch as one pinto bean-sized fishing boat after another plies its way across a glassy blue sea back to a small port. The fishermen have finished their day’s work long before the landlubbers around here have raised the first freddo espressos of the day to their lips. Along the eastern horizon a faintly menacing mountain range ends in a rocky dragon’s tail that flings itself into the sea and there, on the edge of nowhere, Greece pretty much ends. 

 

Welcome to Karystos, improbable southern hub of Evia, a brooding, rugged island in tune with its own obscurity and the living antithesis of Mykonos chic.

 

 

 

 

You’re either going to fall hard for this place or else be gunning for the nearest exit. Of course, despite your unswerving faith in Google maps you might not even find it. Evia is core Greek and off the tourist radar the way some of the best bits of California were before the arrival of the Instagram brigades. There are no knockout hotels; many are frankly bad. The roads lead you to places that have no name, or sometimes just end in a pile of rocks. Even with a companion in tow, you will feel alone. The beaches are drop dead gorgeous, but you could become roadkill trying to find them. Why bother, then?  Well, if the place is good enough for a bloke like Boris Johnson, a regular in these unsung parts, it might just work for you, too.

 

Recent summers have seen the British ex-prime minister fashion himself a perch close to Karystos, where the sights include a crumbling Venetian fortress that dates from the 13th century and — okay, so there’s nothing else. The summer of ‘25 found him here again, with his lovely current wife and children (the ones from current lovely wife). 

 

In summer, you can bet there are paparazzi in Mykonos, and boatloads (literally) of avid TikTokers. In Karystos, there are neither. That in itself is something of a draw, though: have you seen what’s become of Florence lately? Egads.

 

My own reason for coming  was to make an exit from Athens, which is about as cool and appealing in midsummer as is midtown Manhattan. Not even the allure of the Acropolis is a match for an endless trifecta of heatwaves, wildfires and garbage trucks. So with few reservations and fewer euros I fled to Rafina, the workaday port of Athens that is pointedly not the more famous Piraeus. Rafina has all the charm of Staten Island, and can be a little tricky to find the first time, but it offers cheaper and often quicker ways to get to Greek islands like Andros, overrated Tinos, and underrated Evia.

 

From Rafina, the ferry to Marmari on the eastern Evia coast takes only an hour and costs about $12 — a fraction of what it costs to get to better known islands like Milos or Mykonos. If you bring a car on board it costs a few dollars more but it’s worth it, because you need to drive south to get to Karystos and pretty much anywhere else on the island, which is the largest in Greece after Crete.

 

 

 

 

My first foray into Evia was a year or so prior and I focused then on the area around Chalcis, also known as Chalkida or Halkidaor, the main city. It’s one you can actually drive to via a short bridge from the Greek mainland. Chalcis is included in the legendary “Catalogue of Ships” in the second book of Homer’s Iliad. Apparently, Evia was a staging ground for the siege of Troy. According to some sources, King Agamemnon’s fleet was held back by inclement weather on the Euboean shore before it could sail across the Aegean. Chalcis is also home to the oldest Jewish community in Europe and has a synagogue from the 19th century on the site of an earlier one. 

 

But those things surprised me less than the island’s spectacular and virtually unknown back country. Vertiginous peaks and switchback roads to match, untamed cliffs plunging to the infinite sea and hidden villages almost bafflingly Alpine in character with pops of technicolor wildflowers — Evia is an island whose jagged contours smack you like a landscape out of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but with al fresco souvlaki spots reminding you where you are. 

 

Its windswept eastern side resembles Italy’s Amalfi coast in spots, minus the crowds. The best beaches, whether long and open to the Aegean Sea or quiet coves, can be reached only via frequently tortuous roads. A fire truck overtook my car at one point and I soon saw why: off to the side of one particularly hairy bend a vehicle had flipped over. 

 

Hot springs abound; the most renowned are in the north at Adipsos, where Aristotle is said to have journeyed from his Peripatetic School in Athens to soak in the healing waters and clear his head in pre-caffeinated times. In antiquity Evia vied with mighty Athens for regional supremacy. It lost out to Athena, as most contenders did (more on Athens later) and receded to the footnotes of history, but if these days seclusion and fresh air trump crowds and smog it might be time to reassess that particular historical scorecard.

 

 

 

 

That’s what I did, pretty much, in Karystos. 

 

It is very hard to convey in words just to what extent time slows down in a place like this. Walking around the broad and mostly deserted central piazza at midday, when even the cafe cats are too hot to shift their tails, is a surreal experience. Heatstroke would probably be less surreal, and it’s befalling more and more tourists around southern Europe these days. When I stopped by the lone periptero, or newsstand, that was open to buy a bottle of locally produced lemonade, the vendor looked at me as if I were crazy to be out and about as the mercury hovered around 100.

 

So I texted an old friend who I remembered had family in the area, and we agreed to meet in the square. We hatched a plan for him to avoid a long family lunch and for me to find one of those secret beaches that Mr. Johnson apparently favored. 

 

We tumbled into my rented Citroen C1 and headed east out of town, in the direction of a small peninsula where there is an insiders-only kind of beach called Agia Paraskevi. Along the way there was one nearly empty stretch of beach after another, the sparkling cyan waters forming a Cycladic-island style counterpoint to the parched hills.

 

 

 

 

We tried to make a detour at the oddly named Yucca Beach, which looked particularly dreamy from above, but the road down the hill seemed to go only in circles, so we put a pin on that for another day. 

 

Onward to the more distant but more clearly signposted Agia Paraskevi. From another hilltop a series of three ribbons of stunning beaches unfurled below. The main beach was almost ridiculously easy to access: we simply drove up, parked the car, and within about four minutes were already splashing around. That simply doesn’t happen in Mykonos, unless you’re prepared to fork over half a paycheck for a couple hours at a private beach club like Scorpios or Nammos. 

 

The brilliance and clarity of that water outmatched what I’ve seen at some of the best beaches around more famous spots in Mykonos and Corfu. There are little rainbow-colored fish looking at you through the electric blue, happy (I thought) that you don’t want to eat them. Plus, unlike at the crowded beaches around the so-called Athens Riviera, here there is actually soft white sand. It’s a heavenly combination, but with only one small taverna and not much else around besides the sea and sky, an apex beach like this might not be for everyone. 

 

Good.