Walking on Nisyros - Part One

October is an ideal time for walking in the Dodecanese, with the temperatures slightly cooler but the days still mostly sunny with spectacular light. Here on Tilos it’s peaceful and perfect – yet I love to explore other places and walk different routes.

And although it’s barely an hour away by ferry, the volcanic neighbouring island of Nisyros is surprisingly different in its landscape and ecosystem and architecture. After a couple of too-short visits in the past year, I’d promised myself a week in October, and was pleased that Ian felt like coming too. Mostly for his company, of course, though it helps that he’s better than me at finding footpaths and can hold Lisa’s lead when I’m struggling down a steep hillside. He had to work in the mornings but every afternoon we’d be walking.

At Three Brothers Hotel on Mandraki harbour, you can enjoy the sea lapping at the dock, sunrise colours and moonlight on the water, a quick dip off the rocks. You also get to see all the boats arriving and leaving. Despite it being mid-October, almost every morning around 10.30 several excursion boats arrived packed with day-trippers from hotels on Kos, to spend a few hours on the island and take coaches to the volcanic craters. We’d hear tour buses coming and going, Vasili power-washing his rental cars, guides shouting instructions… We were relieved to have a long, relaxed stay on the island.

Nisyros doesn’t have many beaches but the few it has are special. When I first went to Hochlaki almost twenty years ago, there was just a rough path around the cliffs underneath the monastery of Panayia Spiliani, and a sign saying it was forbidden to walk there because of the risk of falling rocks. Now they’ve built a pretty walkway around where you can admire the ochres and rusts and browns of the volcanic rock, though the sign warning of danger remains, as do the falling rocks presumably - though I've never seen one. Hochlaki's big round grey-black pebbles make it a challenge getting in and out of the sea… Yet it’s a magnificent place with the waves crashing in over those pebbles, sending up a spray. On a calm morning I had the beach to myself, and a long swim watching big shoals of seabream.

Still, the best thing was the walking. There are more kilometres of concrete roads than there used to be where I walked and cycled on rough tracks years ago – the roads wrecking a bit more of the surroundings; more shiny new cars, and everyone driving or being driven. But we discovered a wealth of places to walk on paths that are little known, sometimes overgrown or tricky, yet always leading to beautiful or fascinating places. The high you get from setting off every day to explore in sunshine, feeling your legs getting stronger and building up an appetite for dinner – well, I reckon you can’t beat it.

I’ve usually not had access to a decent map, so used the reasonably good one that’s in the free leaflet available widely. This time we had a Skai/Terrain map, and I was excited to have more information. Alas, even allowing for a bit of user error, it felt incomplete and one landmark was wrongly marked; I checked for updates on their website, but found none.

Thankfully, blue and red dots would appear here and there to help us out of a sticky situation (or lure us into one…). With a bit of trial and error, we started to understand the terrain better and look forward to going back for more. Maybe we'd take a pair of secateurs for the prickly oak that has taken over where humans rarely tread.

Having no natural water sources, and rarely using the traditional household cisterns that survive all over the island, the island is now supplied by desalinated water. Temak machines, one in the centre of Mandraki and one at the top (and one in Palli), dispense a better version of this water and we filled bottles for free daily – though occasionally the machines weren’t working, when water was diverted elsewhere or during a power cut. Still, we avoided contributing plastic bottles to the island's rubbish.

Given the scarcity of information for independent hikers, I thought I’d give a vague idea of the walks we did. Most days we set off at lunchtime and walked four or five hours at a moderate pace, including plenty of time for taking photographs and looking inside old buildings; the longest walk took seven hours. All started at Mandraki.

Glimpses of Argos and Trapezina

On the first day, the afternoon was a little hot and sticky with clouds veiling the island's peaks from time to time as we took the lovely stone path from Mandraki – accessed from the last alleyway in the village below the medieval monastery of Panayia Spiliani – up to Palaiokastro, the fortification walls of massive stone blocks dating from the fourth century BC.

Continuing gradually uphill to the south and Stavros monastery, there used to be a rough track with scattered abandoned stone houses when I cycled the island around 2005 and when I walked it in 2015. Alas, it’s now a concrete road all the way – probably a joy to drivers but fairly depressing to me. Ian had read that before the rough track, until a few decades ago there was a centuries-old stone track or kalderimi. We spotted bits of it and although it wasn't marked at all on either map, we agreed to explore another day.

The road passed between the peaks of Trapezina and Karaviotis and I started to see the distinctive euphorbia with its spiky leaves spiralling and turning pink. Beyond there, to the south opened up sweeping views over the tree-covered low hills of Argos. Seeing a trace of kalderimi heading down, we attempted to follow but soon found it too difficult to teeter over loose rocks and dusty gravel, so we veered into the smooth terraces instead and investigated an abandoned house with a fireplace, but we knew we didn't have time to explore this whole area - something for another day.

Returning to the road, from where we could see white-painted Theologos monastery built into steep rock across the caldera, I suggested we take the path down towards the craters and head back to Mandraki via footpaths. I’d taken this path once before and there were blue dots marking the way. Unfortunately, they were the wrong blue dots, leading up instead of down. Intrigued, we followed for twenty scrambly minutes on the slopes of Trapezina until there were sections of rocks jammed tightly together into a beautiful path, albeit overgrown, with views across the caldera to Nikia and down into Stephanos crater. Again, we had to turn back – but would try it another time.

I was hobbling as we retraced our steps down the concrete road, yet there were sunset colours through misty cloud on the mountainsides and on the waves far below. It wasn’t our best day, but put it down to reconnaissance. A hot shower, change of clothes and glass of raki later and we were heading out for a splendid dinner, then slept deeply.

Evangelistria to Nyphios (aka Nymphios) plateau

Above Mandraki, a road meanders around the top of the village and its outlying farms as far as Palaiokastro, while midway another road branches off to zigzag up to the eighteenth-century monastery of Evangelistria. But there are sections of old footpath still to be found between zig and zag heading more directly uphill, sometimes indicated by a sign, until the road levels out for the approach to Evangelistria.

Just before the monastery gates starts a path to Diavatis, the highest peak, and it turned out to be clearly marked, heading gradually up the hillside and past an old farm until it opened out into a glorious view of a hidden narrow valley, Steno, with steep terraces up the sides covered in trees. A short way farther on was a beautiful old chapel with a cistern and a little house built in the traditional style with mortarless stone arches and stone slabs laid in between.

 

Beyond, the path continued clearly up and up the side of Diavatis, winding on an old stone footpath as it grew steeper, with masses of ferns and the occasional cyclamen – which we don’t get on Tilos until winter, and which we'd see here and there all over the high places.

At about 500 metres high the path divides: right to Profitis Ilias, which we’d attempt another day, taking the left turn today to Nyphios. It seemed that quickly we were in another world, the whole hillside deep green with prickly oak that was set on taking over the old walls…

Then the plateau appeared: believed to have been a sacred enclave in the early second millennium BC, perhaps with links to Minoan culture in Crete, it was certainly an atmospheric, hidden place, and the misty cloud contributed to the aura.

A rocky mound in the middle turned out to have deep chambers and, unusually, a stone house built on the top of it. There were notches cut into a rock wall. A little way from there was a wall covering a gap in some rocks, and when I peered inside I saw a chapel built into the cave, supported by a huge rock pillar. The door seemed to be locked but when I called Ian over to see, he just pushed a little harder and we were able to descend the steps.

Outside again, further down the plateau was an old stone complex of buildings, rooms hidden off other rooms, with a chapel in the middle. Almost every stone building on the island is braced with several stone arches. I've read that volcanic earth from a special place in the caldera was spread on top of layers of pumice and branches over the stone to waterproof the roofs. Some have threshing circles on their roofs. And on the roof of a cave shelter was the strange old weathered sculpture speculated to be Minoan 'Horns of Consecration'.

As the sun was going down, we finally continued down the well-marked footpath that joined up with another good footpath coming from the caldera, and headed back across the valley of Kato Lakki to Evangelistria. A spectacular day.

Mandraki to ridge above Steno and Siones

At the top of the monastery end of Mandraki is a sunken chapel in a field of fig trees, and nearby is one of two Temak water dispensers. Just beyond, a narrow bit of road goes slightly uphill, then splits into two footpaths heading uphill between farms, marked on the Skai map. 

We followed the left branch until it crossed the road again and tried to follow it beyond in the direction of Armas, but it soon petered out with a dodgy gate and nothing much on the other side but rubble.

This was a blessing in disguise, as we diverted instead up terraces luxuriant with oak and olive and turpentine trees, finding sunken cave shelters with pointed arched doorways, abandoned houses with their kazanaria, deep bath-shaped structures used for distilling raki, and elaborate, fascinating systems for filling rainwater cisterns and troughs, and sometimes a chapel attached to the house with an ancient grave-marker inside as an altar.

I’ve been aware for several years of an organisation called Anaema offering ‘agrotourism’ experiences on Nisyros, and later I found their website offered useful local information. The holding walls of the terraces are locally called vastadia and the terrace fields tavli (like tables), and half the island was cultivated this way, despite there being very little flat land. They principally grew olive, lemon, turpentine (agramithia), fig, almond and oak trees – almonds being so profuse that they made garlic sauce with it, as they still do, and figs being used with grapes to make a kind of raki called koukouzina. The stone houses, called spiladia, were usually temporary lodgings to use while working in the fields, and thus contained tools and places to distil raki and make cheese and so on.

When I saw a cross carved into red rock above one doorway, I remembered coming here years before from another direction, and recalled an icon to an unusual saint inside – and there he was, Saint Onofrios, the hermit of the desert. Then we heard a couple of gunshots, presumably a hunter, as we had the previous afternoon. The island is probably no longer a monimo katafigio, a permanent wildlife reserve, despite the many signs. Lisa always gets freaked out by shots. She was glad to move on to safety...

As we continued higher up the rough hillside we found a striking ruined chapel with a bright white marble column base on a black altar. The terraces up here were tall and straight and it was too tempting not to keep going up, stepping gingerly across low-growth prickly oak, Lisa leaping from rock to rock, all the way to the ridge we’d seen the day before above Steno. I’d mentioned the idea of following that ridge: could we do it?

It might have been a tough slog in the dying daylight if we hadn’t had the joy of finding red and blue dots to show the way – not always obvious but it was fun finding the route as they continued all the way along the rocky ridge, descending gradually towards a gathering of intriguing buildings around the old Siones monastery. There was no time to stop and look inside at the frescoes – that too would have to wait.

Finally we got down to the road, turning right down towards Palaiokastro but still with just enough light to veer off the concrete on the old kalderimi which, despite not being marked on the map, continued beautifully for a long stretch, emerging near a modern concrete water cistern not far above Palaiokastro. Another fabulous day.

More very soon. 

In the meantime, just a reminder that my new book, Taverna by the Sea, is now out and I'm delighted to say it's had lovely coverage in Wanderlust, the Irish Independent and Kathimerini's K magazine. If you've read it and enjoyed it, online reviews are always helpful. Thanks!