The Real Greek by Lucretia Stewart

To the east of Naxos, the largest (and most beautiful) of the Cyclades, lie four tiny, exquisite, virtually uninhabited islands, the Small Cyclades or Mikres Kyklades. These are Iraklia (not to be confused with Iraklion, the capital of Crete); Schinoussa; Koufonissia, which consists of two small islands, Ano, meaning upper, and Kato, meaning lower, Koufonissi, and Donoussa.

Everyone has a particular favourite: perhaps Iraklia because it is so laidback, or Schinoussa because it is so untouched. Or maybe it's Koufonissia for its fabulous beaches, or Donoussa for its walks and its air of having been forgotten by time. But one thing is true of all four: they have managed to remain unspoilt, by the passage of time and by the twentieth, or now the twenty-first, century.

Don't bother to go there if you are looking for luxury. You won't find it, except in nature - in the sea, the sun, the sand and the stars. Nor will you find much in the way of shopping or nightlife (except maybe something funky in hippy, chic Koufonissia). The accommodation is, on the whole, simple, but clean. The food the same, though there are some good tavernas and the local people go out of their way to be helpful and friendly. There are few cars and motorbikes, but plenty of mules, donkeys, cats, dogs and chickens. There is usually one public telephone and Iraklia had an Internet café, but, for the most part, they are supremely rural. For peace and quiet, for a sense of being miles from anywhere (but, unlike the Caribbean, at a practical distance and a reasonable price), they can't be beat.

Donoussa is the nearest to Naxos, a mere half hour by caique or boat taxi to the north-eastern fishing port of Moutsouna where once they used to mine emery. But Iraklia is the most accessible because it is the first port of call for the Express Skopelitis ('Express!' said the travel agent scornfully and with some justification; it takes an hour and a half to get there), a small ship, which sets off from Naxos six days a week in the early afternoon.

In mid-September, when I was there, the season was winding down. Naxos, where I had been living, had been very windy and unbearably crowded in July and August ('We haven't had a summer this year,' people kept saying) and I feared that the little islands would be suffering the same fate. By September, however, they were tranquil and the landscape was at its most typically Cycladic. Spring, when the land is green and the hills are full of wild flowers and the song of birds, is glorious and also the best time for walking, but the sun-baked harshness of the islands at the end of summer has a terrible beauty. I liked Iraklia immediately, sleepy, low-lying Iraklia, the largest and most sparsely populated of the islands - its core population is just one hundred and twenty people. It reminded me of Barbuda in the Caribbean: the goats, the chickens, the rubbish, the rusting domestic appliances and abandoned vehicles, the plastic crates of empty beer bottles - what a lot of beer seems to be drunk on Iraklia - the same feeling of space and light, the same quiet. In Iraklia, as on the other three, there is not much to do, except read, sleep, walk and swim. The main town, Aghios Georgios, has one surprisingly well-equipped supermarket, the only one on the island, owned by Anna, a cheerful redhead who also ran Anna's Place where I stayed. My room was unexpectedly ritzy; the bathroom and floors were all made of Naxos marble and it had a television. I fell asleep watching a Greek soap opera in which the main character was a woman who looked like Anna and was called Lucrecia. When I woke up, I went out for a walk.

Anna in the supermarket pointed me towards a bar with a view across the harbour, To Sirma, which means 'the wire.' The pretty girl who served me came from Lyons and her boyfriend from Iraklia. They spent the summers there and the winters in France. The apparently deserted BARAKI (meaning, I guess, little bar - 'aki' is a diminutive, unless it was some sort of pun involving the words 'bar' and 'raki'), the BAR in red and the AKI in white, and promising, in wind-faded letters, 'MusicDance', remained resolutely closed, though Elise from To Sirma assured me that it was a 'boîte' which opened late. She made me a plate of accras de morue (cod fritters), like they make in the French Antilles, to eat with my ouzo and I ate them to the accompaniment of a slow, glowing sunset, which coloured the still waters of the bay blood red. The fritters were, she said, very popular with the Greeks, who like food to be 'aromatisé', but not 'epicé'.

There were several tavernas in town. The one above the supermarket, which seemed to share the same name, Perigiali, apparently specialises in fish, but I went to O Pefkos, which is owned by a fisherman of the same name and where you eat whatever he has caught that day. It happened to be calamari - he arrived back with them in a tin basin as I was standing in the kitchen - and his diminutive wife fried them whole, while his overactive three-year-old son rummaged through my bag. Because there are so few people and therefore so few children on each island, strangers tend to be a source of entertainment.

Iraklia had scooters for hire, just six of them (there is no petrol station on the island), and I rode one of them as far as the road was made up. It led to the lovely little chora of Panagia, where a large, curvy, rusting, old, red Mercedes stood by the side of the road. Panagia also had one taverna, To Steki, which means the hangout, and some of the prettiest kittens I have ever seen. The long, golden stretch of Livadi was deserted and the sea was smooth and buoyant. My guidebook (Greek Island Hopping 2003) had described Livadi as 'taverna-backed', but there were no signs of life in the buildings behind the beach, only some concrete benches and tables. Maybe, in high season, somebody does some cooking nearby.

It takes, even on the Skopelitis, only fifteen minutes at most to get from Iraklia to Schinoussa. Schinoussa is higher than Iraklia; it consists of some nine hillocks, several of them topped with derelict windmills. From the harbour to the chora is a steep walk, which, with luggage and in the heat, would be exhausting. But the chances are that you'll get up a ride up the hill with whatever establishment you have chosen to stay in.

Schinoussa, which people tend to adore, is often described as 'dreamy', but that seemed something of an understatement. It was even sleepier than Iraklia with many more, even more beautiful, kittens, and a couple of dogs, but of its population of one hundred and fifty, few people were in evidence. There were three or four shops along the main drag, one selling cigarettes at the older, cheaper price (they went up by 15 cents about a month ago); a pizzeria, where a somewhat sinister (and very heavy) little girl with pointed canines like the little vampire came to sit on my lap and to leaf through the somewhat impenetrable Spanish novel I was reading (in translation), Javier Marías' A Heart So White; a private house outside which hung a handmade sign advertising KOMMOTIRIO (hairdresser) scrawled in faded ballpoint, followed by a mobile phone number. A track that led ultimately down to the beach at Tsigouri and the Grispos Tsigouri Beach Villas went past the Folklore Museum, which was closed (and remained so for the duration of my stay) and the ticket office, which was also closed. I asked when it would be open. 'When you see a motorbike outside, it means he's there,' a woman told me.

I walked past a couple of donkeys down to the Tsigouri Beach Villas. This was a pretty, upmarket complex with rooms, apartments, a nice looking restaurant and, down on the beach itself, a café with good music. The beaches in Schinoussa are not as highly rated as those on the other Mikres Kyklades as they are coarse grey sand, but I thought that one could do a lot worse than spend a few days at the Beach Villas. The other 'smart' hotel is the Iliovasilema (Sunset) Hotel, which has glorious views to the west and over the harbour. The rooms all have a balcony or little terrace facing west. It had no e-mail or website as yet, but 'next year' promised the girl.

Great things are planned for Schinoussa. On a road that led out of town to the northeast and the village of Messaria (home to some twenty Schinoussans) was a billboard detailing the proposed development of the Valley of the Muses. This was to be an 'ecological' development, but it would also include tennis and a beach bar and café. Actually, a lot of building was going on or had been going on for some time in Schinoussa. Whenever I am in Greece, I am reminded of Edmund White's comment that the Greek flag should have a cement mixer on it. There had been a lot of half-finished buildings in Iraklia too and certainly Naxos is littered with the concrete skeletons of get-rich-quick-from-tourists dreams.

On Ano Koufonissi, if the locals don't get rich, it won't be for want of trying. Koufonissia, the smallest and most populated of the islands, is the St. Barts of the Small Cyclades, beloved of rich Athenians and trendy Italians in search of wonderful beaches and nude bathing. The island has a heliport. Doesn't that tell you something? And the fact that it is the only one of these islands that has a petrol station. I liked Koufonissia least of the four, though the beaches are amazing. The atmosphere was subtly different. For the first time, along the pretty paved main street (which is hidden from view, but runs parallel to the sea front road right of the dock) there were souvenir shops, which opened late in the day, after the sun-worshippers had come wearily home from a hard day's hedonism. There were few cats and no kittens. Instead the Koufonissiotes have lapdogs of increasingly exotic varieties. I saw a Papillion, a Griffin and another small fluffy creature that cannot possibly have been and bred on Koufonnissia. A phenomenal amount of construction was taking place. The hotel, in which I stayed, Keros Studios, was elegant in a somehow more cosmopolitan way than Anna's Place in Iraklia, and Sophia, the owner-manager was positively chic. It didn't have a television, but it was designer-ish - and more expensive. Dinner in a windy fish restaurant, where I was the only customer, cost almost as much as my room.

By day the place was virtually deserted. A tractor pulling a trailer picked up the trash and a man raked the town beach, which bisects the town. There weren't enough people to warrant a ten o'clock caique to Pori so I persuaded the captain to take me alone. He dropped me at the end of the landing quay where I remained, but, if you prefer sand, the golden beach is just two minutes away. The sea was absolutely beautiful, aquamarine-clear and equal to the best of the Caribbean. I had the place to myself for two hours until a Greek couple on a motorbike arrived. When they showed up, I went for a walk along the rocky, arid headland. In spring it would be covered with wild flowers, but, by mid-September, it was back down to the rock face, but for a bush of springy wild thyme into which a tiny grey and orange humming-bird, no bigger than my thumb, was making little forays. In season there are regular caiques to Kato Koufonissi, which has a good beach and also an excellent taverna.

For the sake of variety I took the Panagia Tinou (Panagia means All Holy and it is how the Greeks refer to the Virgin Mary, whom they revere; many things in Greece are named after her) onto Donoussa. The Panagia Tinou was a big boat and she is one of two or three which call at the small islands once or twice a week. The ship left around four and went first to Amorgos, the big island, which flanks the little islands to the west. The sun was beginning to diminish in intensity and the light on the water as we sailed from Amorgos onto Donoussa was golden. In September (if you are lucky) the Meltemi ceases to blow and the sea was limpid and luminous.

We arrived around six. Donoussa is where Dionysus is supposed to have hidden Ariadne after he had stolen her from Theseus (the only thing wrong with this story is that, as Theseus had abandoned Ariadne, he was, presumably, quite pleased that Dionysus had taken up with her). Perhaps it was the light, but the island, which is, in reality, a rocky outcrop rising steeply out of the sea east of Naxos, dun-coloured except for a sudden patch of brilliant green that signals the village of Mersini where there is a spring that is the island's main water supply, looked magical, the white chora staggering up the hill, the sea like silky glass, the wanton hue of the bougainvillea leaping out from the evening-muted white of the houses and the beige of the sand and the mule tracks. Only one man and his pick-up were waiting on the quay with an offer of a room, so I took him up it. Later, when I saw the number of lost souls wandering around the town looking for a place to stay, I was glad that I had. As in Ano Koufonissi, the town beach divided the main village, Aghios Stavros, in two. Most of the building and activity was before you crossed the beach. The first shop-taverna you came to was the centre of village life. It was where you could have breakfast, lunch or dinner, drink all day, buy basic supplies, read the notice board to get the number of the boat taxi in Moutsouna, hear the gossip, meet the locals, etc., etc.

The following night was the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (the Greek word for cross is Stavros), after whom Donoussa's largest settlement is named, and there was to be a panegyri at the church the following night. A panegyri is a local gathering in honour of a saint's day and it has to take place round the church named after whichever saint it is. You can't have a panegyri without a church or a saint's day. The biggest ones are on 15th August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, but even a smaller one is an occasion for terrific eating, drinking, dancing, letting off of dynamite and general merrymaking. Timiou Stavrou, the Holy Cross, was probably the high point of the Donoussa social calendar and it was a stroke of luck that I should happen to be on the island for it.

The courtyard of the church was festooned with bunting, and all day long, as I wandered through Aghios Stavros, the smell of cooking permeated the air, to mingle with the smells of ozone, fish and jasmine. In the late afternoon, people began arriving by caique from Koufonissia, Naxos and Amorgos. Around eight, the church bells started to ring and, as amber dusk fell, the lights strung across the church courtyard came on. I waited till it was dark and then walked down the hill and up to the little church. The place was already packed. A panegyri is a free-for-all; everyone is invited and the whole of Donoussa must have been there, plus visitors from the neighbouring islands and tourists. And a panegyri on a tiny island has quite a different feel to it - warm, intimate - from the large, rather commercialised ones you get on Naxos.

Women were ladling an aromatic stew, lamb or goat, I would guess, rich with herbs and wine, into throwaway containers (more practical than paper plates). There were huge containers of boiled potatoes, and others of Greek salad with olives, tomatoes and feta, and mounds of slippery dark-green dolmades; one man was doling out slices of bread from an enormous plastic sack, another was dispensing red or white wine from a couple of big boxes. There were tins of beer, Coca-Cola and Fanta, and patisserie boxes of foil-wrapped, silver, red or gold, sticky cakes.

I made friends with a Dutch couple from Utrecht who had pitched a tent on Kendros Beach, a twenty-minute walk away and the only place where camping was permitted, and we walked down to the largest of the tavernas where music was about to begin. Although we arrived before it began, the place was already packed and, once the music started, the noise deafening. We moved to another nearby taverna, the Meltemi (where I had eaten at lunchtime and which had good food) where there was space and you could get a drink. We could still hear the music perfectly well and, at a slight distance, it sounded even better. Indeed, from an even greater distance in my room across the bay, I could hear it all night long. I lay in bed, listening to the wistful appeal of the bouzouki, sleeping in fits and starts (too much local wine), waking every half hour or so to hear in the distance, the music going on and on - people would have been dancing by now - turning over to go back to sleep, waking again. Finally, at six, as dawn broke, there was silence.

All next day, the mood on the island was jolly, the way it is when everyone has had a terrific party the night before. They're nursing hangovers, they feel perhaps a little rough, but it was worth it. Caique after caique set sail for Amorgos, Koufonissia, Naxos. I missed the one to Naxos and the taxi boat at Moutsouna was out of commission so I spent the day dozing on the beach, waiting for the ancient, creaky Romilda to arrive in the evening and take me, via Amorgos, Koufonissia, Schinoussa and Iraklia (a four-hour trip), home to Naxos. She was late, of course.

As I shouldered my bag and walked to the quay where five fat ducks had been swimming all day - their owner would call down them at regular intervals. 'My loves, how are you? Do you want something to eat?' - echoing in my ears was the phrase, which I had heard throughout the day, 'Kalo himona' - Have a good winter. The summer was over for this year.