Field Notes
The plane banks over open sea for what feels like too long, and then a horseshoe of ochre and rose houses appears below, pressed against a bare grey hill. Kastellorizo is the last piece of Greece before Asia, the easternmost inhabited point of the country and of the European Union. The Turkish town of Kas sits across the water, close enough that at dusk you can watch its windows come on, one by one.
There is one settlement, and it is the harbour. Boats come in past the old customs house and the mosque with its stub of a minaret, and the town wraps around the water on three sides. About five hundred people live here through the winter. In August the number swells with returning families, most of them flying in from Athens or from Australia, where the descendants of the island form one of the largest overseas Kastellorizian communities.
It was not always this quiet. In the nineteenth century Kastellorizo was a merchant port of some ten thousand souls, its captains trading timber and sponges along the Levantine coast. Then came the collapse. An earthquake in 1926, evacuation and heavy bombing in the Second World War, when it stood as the only Allied-held island in these waters. The people scattered. What they left behind is the waterfront you see now, restored house by house, its neoclassical fronts painted in the deep reds and yellows of a wealthier age.
On Kastellorizo the border is not a line on a map. It is a channel of clear water you could swim, and every evening the lights of two countries come on across it at once.
We take a small boat out in the early morning to the Blue Grotto at Parasta, ducking under a low mouth in the cliff. Inside, the sun comes up through the water and floods the cave with a light that seems to have no source. The boatman cuts the engine and lets us drift. Nobody says much.
Back on the quay, the tables fill slowly. Fish, a little wine, the castle on the rock above going gold and then grey. If you have seen the film Mediterraneo, the one that won the Oscar in 1992, you have already seen this harbour. It was shot here, and almost nothing has changed. That is the whole appeal of the place. It sits at the edge, and it waits.
