Rhodes, Chios and Chalki Lead the Greek Island Experience

Chios. Photo © AlekH / Wikimedia Commons

She “fell in love – not with the lad but with the landscape”… that’s what award-winning historian, author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes said of her backpacking in Greece experience in Telegraph Travel.

Tear of mastic, Chios. Photo © Facebook – ΟΙ ΟΜΟΡΦΙΕΣ ΤΗΣ ΕΛΛΑΔΑΣ ΜΑΣ

Hughes returns this time with her daughters some 25 years later to the shores of the Greek islands she loved most: Chios, Rhodes and Chalki.

Chios, she says represents the “cosmopolitan, finely crafted, multi-ethnic mosaic the eastern Mediterranean has always been”.

She speaks if its glamorous, rambling, high-walled estates and soft microclimate that nourishes fruits and nuts as well as the island’s famed mastic gum (masticha Chiou).

Hughes was yet again impressed with the Greek breakfast: “piping hot Greek doughnuts melting with local honey and toasted sesame seeds, cheese fresh-milled that morning, mandarin cake with lemon marmalade or rose-petal jam”.

Lindos, Rhodes

The Rhodes experience at a family-run inn involved everything from cucumber, honey, yogurt and pomegranate face-packs and rose, grenadine, mandarin, cardamom liquors to cookery lessons by the pool and wine-tasting at sunset sitting at “a Downton-worthy dining table laid out by the sea’s edge”.

Chalki. Photo © leoks / Shutterstock

With just 250 permanent inhabitants, Chalki took her back in time when local fishermen dove into the waters to bring up sponges. A stay in a sponge merchant’s house was the ultimate return to nature.

Bettany Hughes’ whole Greek island-hopping experience can be read here.