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I met Judas on the quay. He was sitting defiantly, all alone at a table with his back to the sea. He wore a straw hat, dark glasses, yellow washing-up gloves and a pale jacket, much too tight. Someone had put a can of Heineken in his hand and an unlit cigar in his mouth. It was better unlit as his body was stuffed with straw and gunpowder. He looked as though he was trying to brazen it out, but it was clear the game was up.

He was not the first to have sat by the taverna, waiting for the men to drag him away and hang him from the tree by the church. During the war, a group of British paratroopers were captured on Halki’s satellite island, Alimnia, and shot as spies. The Gestapo exacted their usual reprisals on the civilian population, and, after the war, collaborators must have suffered a similar fate.

Halki is a small arid rock, only an hour on the ferry from Rhodes. The guidebooks call it an “unspoilt island”, but the reality has been 2,000 years of destruction and betrayal at the hands of Romans, Arabs, Turks, pirates, Italians and Germans, and the experience has left deep scars in the island’s psyche.

All islands are slightly peculiar. Cut off from the mainstream, they evolve in strange directions, with their own peculiar customs and a collective memory that stretches back further than in mainland communities. Greek islands are more peculiar than most, with what John Fowles called their “sinister-fascinating, Circe-like quality”. And even by the standards of most Greek islands, Halki is decidedly odd. The Lonely Planet guide mentions its “hushed, slightly weird atmosphere”, which is putting it mildly.

It doesn’t get mentioned in the history books, and no one stopped off here on their way back from Troy. There was once a marble acropolis on the top of the hill, but the crusaders pulled it down and used the stone to build a castle, itself now a ruin. Occasionally, you can see pieces of older stone in the neoclassical villas round the harbour, and lying in an alleyway, half hidden among the daisies, is a fragment of marble with a bas-relief of Apollo Helios.

The sponge industry led to a brief prosperity in the 19th century, but then a virus killed the sponges and the island began to die. The population dwindled from more than 4,000 in the last century to fewer than 300. The grand neo-classical villas fell into decay. But many of the old inhabitants return for the Easter celebrations, and for a few weeks each spring the island is covered in wild flowers, seemingly growing out of bare rock.

The men of the island are not, at first sight, an attractive lot. Spoilt as children and macho as adults, it is only in old age, when the testosterone has dropped below the radioactive level, they become accessible human beings. Once, late at night, I couldn’t find my five-year-old son and went down to the harbour to see him chatting earnestly in a cafe with a group of old men. They were sitting round in a circle nodding their heads wisely. I can’t imagine what they were talking about.

The women are a different matter: disconcertingly pretty when young, although probably best treated with care if you value your life. In old age, even after a lifetime of largely unappreciated toil, they still have a sense of fun.

In the days before Easter, the island is full of the sound of bleating lambs. On Saturday, the noise stops and, every time you turn a corner, you find an animal being skinned and dismembered for the Sunday feast.

At night, islanders parade round the town banging on the doors to drive away demons. You could be woken up at 3am by someone crowing like a cock just outside your window. You may think this is a quaint example of local colour. Or possibly not.

On Easter Sunday, even the island’s drunks put on suits and go to the church and sit among the candles, icons, gilt and clouds of incense. At the end of a seriously long service, the priest announces: “The Lord is risen,” and you go out blinking into the sunlight where Judas is hanging from his makeshift scaffold.

Someone has pinned a €50 note to the front of his jacket and placed a sheet of corrugated iron under his feet to protect the pebble mosaic. The men of the island throw lighted torches at his body until he catches fire and explodes.

This is not a piece of bonfire-night jollity; the crowd is silent, sombre and deadly serious. There is an unmistakable undercurrent of paganism recalling Tammuz, or Adonis, the god who dies each year and whose rebirth brings life to the island and fertility to the crops. Only the names have been changed. Judas is not just the betrayer of Jesus. He is the Lord’s dark twin, his doppelgänger, his secret sharer, consigned to take his place in the Underworld for the duration.

At some point, the ominous thought occurs to you that, not that long ago, it was not an effigy but a real person who was sacrificed.

One afternoon, I sat in the shade of the taverna in the bay by the beach, drinking retsina with an old man called Pepe. He told me in broken English the story of how once - I couldn’t make out when - the islanders had been playing by the beach when pirates arrived unnoticed and took away all their women.

He said that, years later, the “spongimen” went off to Egypt to hunt the “spongi”, and there they found the women and brought them home and built the small shrine at the edge of the bay as an act of thanksgiving.

It might have happened 400 years ago but, from the way Pepe spoke, it was still a painful memory.

It sounded like something from Edward Lear – spongimen, the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Dong with the Luminous Nose searching for his lost Jumbly love. I wondered if Lear ever made it to Halki on his travels, but the same story could be told on many Greek islands, although without the happy ending.

I wanted to ask Pepe about the war, and particularly the British paratroopers. I had heard that their death warrants were signed by someone who later earned a worldwide reputation as a statesman.

I asked what it was like here during the occupation, but it seemed as though he hadn’t heard. After a long pause, he said, staring fixedly out into the bay: “We like the British. If you were German or Italian, I would not be sitting here.” And that was all he was going to say.

On our last day on the island, the children wanted to swim, but there had been a storm in the night and the water was thick with mud, and there was a large dead eel, about 3ft long, in the sea at the edge of the small beach. I tried to fish it out with a stick, but it kept slipping off. My wife, who is clearly much braver than I am, was going to pick it up with her hands until I dissuaded her: it was hooped yellow and black, colours that do not usually signify a benevolent disposition, and even in death, it was not something to treat lightly. After many failed attempts, I had nearly lifted it clear of the water, when it suddenly came back to life and sank its teeth deep into the stick.

We didn’t go swimming that day.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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