Overview

Karpathos has the wildest landscape and coastal waters in the Dodecanese. Its northern half is a steep sculpted ridge of mountains that drop abruptly to the sea, while the southern tip of the island is an open landscape of soft eroded sandstone. The monuments of its past which remain today are characterised by a quality of unusualness: the site of Ancient Brykous projecting into the island's northwestern waters is one of the Aegean's most lonely; further south at Lefkos is a unique and well-preserved hypogeum of the Late Hellenistic period; another of the island's ancient cities Arkaseia flourished into Early Christian times with at least two sizeable basilicas with mosaic floors of extraordinary quality. Kasos today is a friendly and unpretentious island, small and easily walkable for the visitor. In the last decade Tilos has distinguished itself from all other Greek islands by concertedly espousing the causes of wild-life and environmental conservation. The island's dramatically varied landscape, rich in water and oscillating from steep mountains to fertile plains by the shore, helps to sustain its diversity of flora and wild-life as well as to provide countless walking opportunities. Equidistant between Alexandria and Athens, Kastellorizo has admirably refused to be forgotten by history. Its ancient wine-pressing installations, fine burial places, impressive early walls and its network of cisterns are all evidence of an earlier thriving community. Perhaps no other island in the Aegean feels as dramatically spacious for its size as remote Astypalaia; the greater part of the island is populated most visibly by a remarkable quantity and variety of birds. Astypalaia has two artistic treasures of importance. Its splendidly sited Chora is one of the most beautiful in the Aegean islands. Second, perhaps more than any island other than Kos, it has a remarkable wealth of Early Christian mosaic floors dating from the 5th century.

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9781907859199

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Reviews of McGilchrist's Greek Islands: Delightful, well-observed, literary accompaniments to the Greek islands, by a British scholar.A The Economist,Books of the Year 2010 So evocative and informative, one hardly needs to go... Lovely...A Bettany Hughes, Sunday Herald - Books of the Year2010 A remarkable achievement - a complete, island by island, 3,000 page survey of all the historical monuments in the Aegean...A Barnaby Rogerson, Country Life Wonderful... superbly structured; immense learning elegantly, unobtrusively offered; and outstandingly well writtenA Prof. Jon Stallworthy, Wolfson College, Oxford

Author Information

Nigel McGilchrist lectures widely in art and archaeology at museums and institutions both in Europe and in the United States. He was Director of the Anglo-Italian Institute in Rome for six years, taught at the University of Rome, for the University of Massachusetts and was for seven years Dean of the joint Faculty of European Studies for a consortium of American Universities and Colleges. In recent years he has been lecturing at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. Over the last six years he has walked every path and village of the sixty inhabited Greek Aegean islands in order to prepare the twenty volumes of McGilchrist's Greek Islands. He lives near Orvieto in Italy where he produces olive oil and red wine.

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