There are so many Greek islands that when friends ask me, as editor of a travel magazine, to recommend the best one to visit it's difficult because of the diversity of the islands. Well- known names such as Mykonos and Santorini are familiar to many American travelers, and rightly so. The nightlife and posh shops of Mykonos are fabled; watching the sunset from the village of Oia on the northwestern tip of Santorini is justly famous. But there are hundreds of other islands where the pace is more leisurely, where eight or nine people in a town square constitute a crowd.

As I climb up a rough road built only a decade ago on the island of Karpathos, my Greek guide tells me that the village ahead of us, Olympos (spelled "Olimbos" by the Greeks), is the only worthwhile place to visit on the island.

"The rest is civ-i-liz-ed," she says contemptuously, drawing out the word. "You know--pizza parlors, souvenirs, discos. But this is the town that God forgot."

Karpathos is the second-largest island of the Dodecanese chain that lies between more famous neighbors, Rhodes and Crete. It's a mountainous island, but home to most residents is the south coast where the land flattens out. Nearby is Karpathos' capital city and main port, Pigadia, built primarily with American dollars sent home by immigrants who settled in the United States. Its buildings are starkly different from the traditional architecture found in several older villages that dot the island.

Olympos is perched on a hillside overlooking the azure Aegean Sea. Founded between the 8th and 15th centuries, the village was originally fortified to protect it from pirates. Today, it's still a sheltered town whose residents seem stuck in time-- some still speak a greek dialect that contains Dorian words and idioms.

And if our guide thinks most of the villages in Karpathos are too commercial, well, I can't imagine what I'll find in Olympos.

Dodging donkeys, I trudge up a narrow street past women dressed in traditional, embroidered jackets, scarves, and pinafores, with heavy collars of gold coins. Isolated for centuries, Olympos offers eye-filling views of an Aegean whose waters many of the town's residents--incredibly enough--have never visited.

I stop in a dusty, mural-filled Byzantine church on the tiny town square and sip tea in the priest's two-room home that's filled with family portraits, ceramics, and silver icons.

Then I continue up and down village alleys, catching Homeric vistas of great rocky prows bullying into blue seas. In a small café that--judging from the reaction when I enter--few out- of-towners have visited, the fare is simple. For breakfast: fried dough dipped in honey seasoned with cinnamon. Lunch is makarounes--homemade pasta with onions and cheese--and koulouria, biscuits made with flour ground in the village's medieval windmills and baked in outdoor ovens.

As I leave, I run a gauntlet of wide-eyed, friendly villagers who sell mostly what they make or harvest. An old lady--no front teeth, kaleidoscopically colorful skirt, goat-leather shoes--negotiates virtually all her wares away in expressive Greek. I buy powerfully scented oregano and thyme groomed from nearby hills, pick through aqua-blue pottery that-- yes!--is not imported from some distant factory. I grab handfuls of rough-hewn olive soap and tins of local honey. Then I am gone, zigzagging the four miles back down to the sea, thinking Olympos may be a place God forgot--but I won't.

For details on where to stay on Karpathos, visit travel-to-karpathos.com. For general information, check out karpathos.com and thegreektravel.com/karpathos.

Keith Bellows is editor and vice president of National Geographic Traveler.

Learn to Speak the Greek

November 2003