In the endless silence of uninhabited islands

Maria Luisa Colledani

Home means silence and blue, and Jennifer Barclay has found it in Tílos, where she has been living for a decade. Better the Aegean than grey England. The Dodecanese, the twelve islands off the Turkish coast from Agathonísi, in the north, to Kastellorizo, in the south, is her horizon, which she recounts in Remote Enchantment, a journey through reefs and inlets through stories and faces off the beaten track because she noticed dramatic changes over a century and wanted to investigate them.

It is not a tourist guide, it is an act of love, it is research to understand the land that welcomed it. In these waters, the ancients met and clashed, in 1309 Rhodes was conquered by the Knights of St John and the Ottoman Empire ruled for a long time and Italy in 1936 had relocated over 16,000 Italians, but natural disasters, violent wars and oppression have brought a certain isolation: 'My interest has become almost an obsession to search for abandoned and ruined places to investigate.

The journey begins in Tílos. Mikro Horio, 'small village', was founded centuries ago as a defence against pirates and was abandoned fifty years ago, everyone fleeing to the USA or Australia in search of work. The terraces around it, protected from the wind by tamarisk trees, bear witness to ancient life and labours. Today it is just silence and ruins: "In this landscape shaped by abandonment, more recent renunciations attract me. The beauty is contained in the craft skills and stories, which tell how people lived in past centuries", and the writer, who has classical studies behind her, gathers voices and images and also the fears of the latest arrivals, the migrants fleeing war and hunger.

Every island has its corners of enchantment and the past. They must be sought out before mass tourism buries objects and memory. Nísyros is worth a visit for the crater of the Stefanos volcano, a moonscape to be reckoned with, and the baths of Pantelidis, now abandoned but rich in history. On Kos you can trust the water, which in Kálymnos turns to gold thanks to the sponges. Astypálaia is fiery rocks and windows for bees; Rhodes a thousand stories of merchants, brigands and rulers; Olympos, in Kárpathos, a colourful cloud hanging in the sky; Caso and Chálki are the most remote and that is where you must go, especially in August. And even more so in Arki, few roads, zero road signs, a family with a thousand goats and the best mizithra cheese in the Aegean.